J'Accuse...!

Front page cover of the newspaper L'Aurore for Thursday 13 January 1898, with the letter J'Accuse...! , written by Émile Zola about the Dreyfus affair . The headline reads I Accuse...! Letter to the President of the Republic .

01Chris Mahlangu and a fifteen-year-old accomplice beat and hacked Terre'Blanche to death in his bedroom over an unpaid wage of approximately R800.
02Terre'Blanche had previously been convicted of assaulting a Black petrol-station attendant; he served part of a jail sentence in the 1990s.
03The AWB leader who once rode white horses through rallies was found face-down on his bed, killed by men he had allegedly refused to pay.

01Parkhurst voted in the 1868 U.S. presidential election in Santa Cruz County, the first known trans man to do so in America.
02Described by contemporaries as among the finest stagecoach drivers on the California-Oregon run, handling six-horse teams in mountain snow.
03At death in 1879, a coroner's examination revealed Parkhurst's birth sex — news that reached newspapers across the country within days.

Tupac Shakur (right) and The Notorious B.I.G. (left), the two main figures of the East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry, prior to the conflict in 1993 in Los Angeles. The image was also used in the 2002 feature-length documentary film…

Zola's open letter, published across the front page of L'Aurore on 13 January 1898, named eleven army and government officials by name. The editor printed 300,000 copies; Paris sold out before noon.

Eugène Terre'Blanche

Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging leader Eugène Terre'Blanche — neo-Nazi, horseman, poet — was hacked to death with a panga by a farmworker named Chris Mahlangu in 2010, reportedly over a wage dispute of less than $50.

Quokka

The quokka, Australia's smiling marsupial, ejects its pouch joey directly into a predator's path — a muscular contraction, not a choice — then flees while the infant screams.

Viktor Orbán

Viktor Orbán told a summer university audience in July 2022 that Hungarians must not become a 'mixed-race' people — prompting his own advisor, Zsuzsa Hegedűs, to resign and call it a 'pure Nazi speech.'

Charley Parkhurst

Charley Parkhurst drove stagecoaches through the Sierra Nevada for decades — one-eyed, weathered, legendarily skilled — and cast a ballot in California in 1868, fifty-two years before women were legally permitted to vote there.

Timur

Outside Delhi in 1398, Timur's men assembled towers of 90,000 skulls. He killed perhaps 17 million people — roughly 5% of the world's population at the time.

East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry

By 1997, two of rap's biggest figures were dead and their labels were in ruin. What began as promotional rivalry between Death Row and Bad Boy became geography that determined whose side you were on at gunpoint.

Diplodocus

Diplodocus's tail ended in a thin whip-tip that could break the sound barrier — a 45-foot bullwhip cracking a sonic boom, possibly the loudest sound made by any land animal.

Eisriesenwelt

Eisriesenwelt stretches 42 kilometres into the Austrian Alps — the world's largest accessible ice cave — where wind racing through the entrance freezes meltwater into towers and archways that survive year-round despite mild summers above.