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Genomic sequencing of teeth from a Kyrgyz graveyard dated 1338 — just ten years before the Black Death — pinpoints a single cemetery as the plague's origin. The headstones name the disease.

Aldrich Ames ran the CIA's Soviet counterintelligence division while methodically selling its agent roster to Moscow. Within a year of his first data dump in 1985, at least ten CIA assets inside the Soviet Union were executed.

Malaysia's 1MDB sovereign wealth fund — created to build schools and hospitals — bought a $250 million superyacht, a Picasso, and financed The Wolf of Wall Street. The fund lost $4.5 billion. The prime minister who authorized it won an election first.

Elderly Arab men, per medieval accounts, volunteered to subsist entirely on honey until their flesh was saturated — then, after death and 100 years of submersion in honey, their preserved corpses were sold as medicine.

Switch a lamp on and off — once per second, then half a second, then a quarter — completing infinite switches in two minutes flat. Mathematics gives no answer to whether it's on or off at minute two.

Paris workers governed themselves for 72 days in 1871, burning the Tuileries Palace on their way out. The French army then shot an estimated 10,000 Communards in one week. Self-rule ended in a mass grave.

Mirin Dajo let an assistant plunge a steel rapier clean through his torso in front of audiences — organs intact, no anesthetic. He died swallowing a steel needle, not a blade.

Kate Millett's 'Sexual Politics' (1970) read D.H. Lawrence's and Henry Miller's sex scenes as political documents — finding in their prose the grammar of female subordination. Miller's publishers had called him a liberator.

Liu Cixin's axiom: the cosmos is a dark forest where every hunter hides. One transmission, one coordinate — and the shooter never misses. The universe's silence is not emptiness; it's discipline.