Patti Smith

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Patti Smith spent years photographing Robert Mapplethorpe's hands — obsessively, serially — because, she wrote, she couldn't stop seeing them. Her 2010 memoir 'Just Kids' won the National Book Award and was written, she said, to keep a promise to a dying man.

Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, was placed on a presidential kill list, denied due process in U.S. courts, and killed by CIA drone in Yemen in September 2011. His lawyers were told they needed a license to represent him.

Priests called Luperci slaughtered goats, cut strips from the hides, smeared sacrificial blood on two boys' faces, then ran naked through Rome striking every woman they passed. February. Every year.

At 150 mph in a stoop, the golden eagle strikes with talons exerting 750 psi — roughly the grip of a hydraulic press on a soda can. Civilizations from the Mongols to Rome named themselves by this bird.

The axolotl never undergoes metamorphosis — it breeds, ages, and dies as a permanent larva — and can regenerate a functional heart, spinal cord, and portions of brain within weeks.

In 'Rhythm 0,' Abramović lay passive for six hours while strangers chose from 72 objects — including a loaded gun and rose thorns — to do whatever they wished to her body. She was cut, kissed, and aimed at.

Preciado injected black-market testosterone daily while writing 'Testo Junkie,' using his own body as the laboratory. Philosophy as self-experiment: what happens when the theorist becomes the specimen?

South Africa's most beloved cricket captain Hansie Cronje confessed he fixed matches partly for a leather jacket. The man who led his country's post-apartheid sporting resurrection died in a plane crash two years later.

Fred Lorz crossed the 1904 Olympic marathon finish line first, accepted the gold medal from Alice Roosevelt, then admitted a car had driven him 11 of the 26 miles. He claimed it was a joke.