Gayle Rubin

Tollund Man , Denmark, 4th century BC

U.S. representative Michael Myers , second from left, holds an envelope containing $50,000 that he just received from undercover FBI agents

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 .

Gayle Rubin's 1984 essay 'Thinking Sex' placed consensual intergenerational sex on a 'charmed circle' diagram beside murder as objects of equal public hysteria. The map still burns.

Patti Smith

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.

Bog body

Iron Age men, women, and children were pressed face-down into peat bogs; two thousand years later, Tollund Man surfaced with his stubble, stomach contents — last meal: porridge — and the noose still around his neck.

Vito Acconci

Acconci hid under a gallery ramp, masturbating and whispering sexual fantasies at the footsteps overhead — the whole act transmitted through speakers. The gallery was Sonnabend, 1972. His target was whoever paused.

Abscam

FBI agents dressed as Arab oil sheikhs invited seven U.S. congressmen to a fake Washington townhouse and filmed them pocketing cash bribes — one congressman stuffed $25,000 into his suit pockets on camera and said, 'I'm gonna keep this.'

J'Accuse...!

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.

Jorunna parva

The sea bunny's fluffy white 'ears' are rhinophores chemically reading seawater molecules; its spotted coat broadcasts toxin harvested from the sponges it eats — softness as a warning label.

Ali Hassan al-Majid

"Chemical Ali" ordered nerve-agent strikes on Kurdish villages, killing up to 100,000 people, then calmly signed the paperwork annexing Kuwait. He was hanged in 2010, convicted four times over.

1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack

To swing a 1984 county election in Oregon, Rajneeshees poured salmonella cultures onto ten restaurant salad bars, sickening 751 people — the first bioterror attack on U.S. soil. The plot was conceived by Ma Anand Sheela.