Leonarda Cianciulli

Anthony "Tino" De Angelis

1920 advertisement for the Thor electric washing machine.

Plot of Weierstrass function over the interval [ − 2, 2]. Like some other fractals , the function exhibits self-similarity : every zoom (red circle) is similar to the global plot.

Messenia , homeland of Sparta's helot population, from Mount Ithome .

15-year-old Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ giving her testimony to the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, two months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait . It was later revealed that she was the daughter of Kuwaiti…

Leonarda Cianciulli

Leonarda Cianciulli boiled three women into soap and stirred their fat into teacakes she served to neighbors in Correggio. Her motive: she believed human sacrifice would protect her son from dying in World War II.

Battle of Actium

Cleopatra's 60 ships broke from the battle line and fled south without warning. Antony, commanding the largest naval force in the ancient world, abandoned his fleet and his men to follow her by rowboat. He never commanded again.

Salad oil scandal

Tino De Angelis filled vast New Jersey tanks mostly with seawater, floated a thin film of soybean oil on top for inspectors, and borrowed $175 million against it. The 1963 collapse took down two Wall Street firms in a single afternoon.

Thor washing machine

The 1908 Thor washing machine married bare copper wiring to a full tub of water and called it progress. Its inventor, Alva Fisher, left the ground wire out entirely. It sold briskly.

Weierstrass function

Weierstrass wrote down a function in 1872 that draws a continuous curve — no gaps, no jumps — yet has no defined slope at any single point. Every zoom reveals more jaggedness. It shouldn't exist; it does.

Gloria Anzaldúa

Anzaldúa theorized the US–Mexico border not as a line but a wound that produces a new consciousness — mestiza, queer, split-tongued. She wrote 'Borderlands' in 1987 in poverty, on a used typewriter.

Crypteia

Spartan boys earned citizenship by stalking and murdering helot slaves at night, alone, with a knife. The state called it education. The helots called it nothing — they left no record.

Bahram Chobin

Bahram Chobin killed the Turkic khagan Shaba in single combat in 589, returned a hero — then, stripped of rank by a jealous emperor, raised a rebellion and took the Persian throne with no Arsacid drop of blood.

Nayirah testimony

A 15-year-old girl wept to Congress about Iraqi soldiers dumping Kuwaiti babies from incubators. She was the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter, coached by PR firm Hill & Knowlton for $10.8 million.