Paul B. Preciado

A Coleman white gas lantern mantle glowing at full brightness

A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry depicting Bishop Odo rallying Duke William 's army during the Battle of Hastings in 1066

Medieval English split tally stick ( front and reverse view). The stick is notched and inscribed to record a debt owed to the rural dean of Preston Candover , Hampshire, of a tithe of 20 d each on 32 sheep, amounting to a total sum of £2…

Kanuni i Lek Dukagjinit

A slab of pykrete

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?

Gas mantle

Before electricity, a mesh sock soaked in radioactive thorium dioxide burned inside every middle-class parlour lamp. The mantles crumbled to radioactive dust when touched. Millions were sold; none came with warnings.

The History of Sexuality

Foucault's 'History of Sexuality' — three volumes published before AIDS killed him — argued the Victorian era didn't repress sex; it invented an entirely new way to talk, confess, and be made by it.

Bayeux Tapestry

Embroidered in wool on linen 70 metres long, the Bayeux Tapestry was likely stitched within twenty years of the 1066 invasion it records — by English hands, for a Norman patron, depicting the death of a king the embroiderers may have watched fall.

Tally stick

For 700 years, the English Exchequer split hazel sticks to record royal debts — the king kept one half, the creditor the other. In 1834, Parliament burned the old sticks and accidentally set Westminster on fire.

Houston Astros sign stealing scandal

Houston Astros players watched a live camera feed of the catcher's signals and banged a trash can once or twice to tell batters what pitch was coming. They won the World Series doing it.

Kanun (Albania)

The Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini sets a precise cash tariff for murder, specifies which rooms of a house grant sanctuary, and has been cited in Albanian court defenses as recently as the 1990s.

Protoceratops

Protoceratops skulls and clawed skeletons littered the Gobi Desert for millennia before Greece mapped the Silk Road. Herodotus's gold-guarding griffin may be the fossil, remembered wrong.

Pykrete

Pykrete — 14% sawdust locked in ice — stopped bullets in tests and barely melted. Project Habbakuk planned a 2-million-ton aircraft carrier made of it; a scale model was demonstrated to Churchill in a Quebec hotel bathtub.