Sacred Band of Thebes

The ruins of ancient Theban citadel of Cadmea

Chapel interior

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…

Enemies being killed and roasted in South America – engraving by Theodor de Bry (1592)

01'Kubla Khan' was written in a single opium-induced session in 1797; Coleridge claimed an interruption by 'a person from Porlock' broke the trance.
02By 1816 Coleridge was consuming up to two quarts of laudanum per week, documented in letters to his physician James Gillman.
03Wordsworth formally ended their friendship partly over Coleridge's unreliability — lectures cancelled, manuscripts undelivered, debts accumulated.

The Kwakwaka'wakw continue the practice of potlatch. Illustrated here is Wawadit'la in Thunderbird Park , Victoria, B.C. , a big house built by Chief Mungo Martin in 1953. Wealthy, prominent hosts would have a Big House specifically for…

Sacred Band of Thebes

Thebes' Sacred Band — 300 men arranged as 150 lover-pairs — held the line against Philip of Macedon at Chaeronea in 338 BC. Every single one died in formation. Philip wept over the bodies.

Sedlec Ossuary

A 13th-century Czech chapel holds chandeliers, coats of arms, and garland decorations made entirely from approximately 40,000 human skeletons. A woodcarver named František Rint signed his name in the corner — in bones.

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.

Human cannibalism

The Fore people of Papua New Guinea ate their dead as mourning rite; it transmitted kuru, a fatal prion disease, killing thousands. Women and children died faster — they ate the brain.

Mithridates VI Eupator

On a single morning in 88 BC, Mithridates' agents killed 80,000 Romans across Asia Minor — a pre-arranged signal to local populations who had been hiding the order for weeks.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge wrote 'Kubla Khan' in an opium dream in 1797, then spent forty more years unable to quit — dictating, borrowing money, and theorizing consciousness while his doses climbed. Wordsworth eventually cut him off. The poem stayed unfinished.

Paul B. Preciado

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?

Potlatch

Pacific Northwest chiefs burned blankets, smashed canoes, and gave away slaves to humiliate rivals — the more you destroyed, the higher your rank. Canada banned the ceremony in 1885.

Barrel murder

A merchant named Benedetto Madonia was folded into a barrel and left on East 11th Street in 1903 — America's first documented Mafia homicide, solved by a detective who matched a barrel stave to a sawdust trail.