gnostekEvander Holyfield vs. Mike Tyson II1500%Sports gaffesTyson bit a chunk from Holyfield's right ear in round three, spat the cartilage on the canvas, and kept throwing punches. The referee stopped the fight. Holyfield's ear was never fully repaired.+ See More01Tyson bit off roughly 1 inch of Holyfield's right ear cartilage in round three.02Ring official Mills Lane initially let the fight continue before stopping it 40 seconds later.03Tyson was fined $3 million and had his boxing license revoked for 15 months.
gnostek‹›1 / 6Michel Foucault1110%Revolutionaries in Queer TheoryFoucault spent his last years cruising San Francisco bathhouses while dying of AIDS — a fact he reportedly knew. The man who said power invented sexuality lived the argument to its end.+ See More01Foucault was reportedly aware he had AIDS by 1983 and continued frequenting San Francisco bathhouses through that year.02He coined 'biopower' — the state's management of bodies and populations — in a 1976 lecture at the Collège de France.03His 'Discipline and Punish' (1975) opens with a four-page description of a man being drawn and quartered in 1757 Paris.
gnostek‹›1 / 3Stephen A. Schwarzman1310%Legendary private equity dealsSteve Schwarzman spent $3 million on his 60th birthday party — a Rod Stewart performance, a portrait of himself unveiled mid-room — then wrote a memoir advising readers to 'never do anything small.' The portrait still hangs at Blackstone.+ See More01Schwarzman's 2007 birthday party at the Park Avenue Armory cost an estimated $3 million and featured Rod Stewart.02Blackstone's IPO that same year valued Schwarzman's personal stake at roughly $7.8 billion.03He later donated $100 million to Yale, $150 million to MIT, and $188 million to Oxford — each naming a building.
gnostek‹›1 / 3Recreation of Martin Luther King Jr. 's cell in Birmingham Jail at the National Civil Rights MuseumLetter from Birmingham Jail200%Moments when a single email changed historyWritten in margins of smuggled newspaper and on scraps of paper, King's letter from Birmingham Jail on April 16, 1963 answered eight clergymen by name. It circulated in millions of copies within the year.+ See More01King wrote in the margins of a Birmingham newspaper because guards had initially denied him paper.02The letter responds point by point to eight named white Alabama clergymen who called the protests 'unwise.'03Circulated first as a pamphlet by the American Friends Service Committee before reaching millions of readers.
gnostek+15‹›1 / 22Voltaire1100%Claim: The Bible is a SatireVoltaire scrawled 'absurd' across his personal Bible hundreds of times, then predicted Christianity would be extinct within a century. His Geneva house became a Bible Society depot 50 years after his death.+ See More01Voltaire predicted Christianity would collapse within 100 years; the Geneva Bible Society occupied his house by 1828.02He annotated his own copy of the Bible with the word 'absurd' in the margins, repeatedly, throughout.03Voltaire wrote over 20,000 letters in his lifetime, many mocking Scripture by quoting it back verbatim.
gnostekCIH (computer virus)1100%Malware programsCIH triggered on April 26 — Chernobyl's anniversary — flashing BIOS chips into permanent silence. Written by Taiwanese student Chen Ing-hau in 1998, it destroyed hardware, not just files.+ See More01CIH was written by Taiwanese student Chen Ing-hau while attending Tatung University in 1998.02It triggered on April 26, the Chernobyl disaster anniversary, earning the nickname "Chernobyl virus."03Unlike most viruses, CIH overwrote BIOS firmware, making infected machines unable to boot at all.
gnostek‹›1 / 3Ninja Gaiden II400%Best Xbox 360 GamesLimbless enemies drag themselves across the floor on their chins to bite the player. Ninja Gaiden II's 2008 combat generates severed-limb piles no other game has matched. The genre called it ultraviolence; reviewers called it art.+ See More01Enemies with no arms and no legs still crawl forward to bite you — programmed behavior, not a glitch.02The game renders dismembered limb physics per body part, creating literal piles of human debris mid-fight.03Director Tomonobu Itagaki left Tecmo in a lawsuit the same year the game shipped, June 2008.
gnostek‹›1 / 2Horst Mahler500%Disgraced PoliticiansHorst Mahler co-founded the Red Army Faction as a leftist anti-fascist lawyer, then transformed into a Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi who greeted his 2009 prison sentence with a raised-arm Hitler salute in the courtroom.+ See More01Mahler co-founded the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Group) in 1970 as a Marxist revolutionary organization.02Decades later, he publicly sent a Hitler-salute greeting card to the Central Council of Jews in Germany.03By 2009, sentenced to over 12 years for Holocaust denial, he saluted the judge from the defendant's bench.
gnostek‹›1 / 3Alice Schwarzer100%foundations of radical feminismIn 1971, German editor Alice Schwarzer persuaded 374 women — including Romy Schneider — to sign a magazine cover confessing to illegal abortions. The public self-incrimination was calculated to overwhelm any prosecution.+ See More01The cover of Stern magazine ran the headline 'Wir haben abgetrieben' — 'We have had abortions' — with 374 signatories.02Actress Romy Schneider was among the signatories, making the confession front-page news across Europe.03Schwarzer modeled the action directly on a simultaneous French campaign featuring 343 women, including Simone de Beauvoir.