Roman triumph

Panel from a representation of a triumph of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius ; a winged genius hovers above his head

An illustration of Cantor's diagonal argument (in base 2) for the existence of uncountable sets . The sequence at the bottom cannot occur anywhere in the enumeration of sequences above.

Red Bird – watercolour on paper

01Daly grouped Chinese footbinding — which broke and rebound girls' feet from age 5, targeting a billion women over ten centuries — alongside 20th-century psychiatric treatment as equivalent tortures.
02Audre Lorde wrote Daly a letter in 1979 accusing her of using women of color only as victims in a white feminist framework; Daly did not respond for over a year.
03The book coined the term 'gynecide' and introduced 'hag,' 'crone,' and 'spinster' as reclaimed feminist honorifics still in academic use today.

Behind the conquering general's chariot, a slave stood holding a golden crown over his head and was required by ritual to repeat 'memento mori' — remember you will die — for the entire procession through Rome.

Cantor's diagonal argument

Cantor showed in 1891 that the infinity of real numbers cannot be listed — proving it by constructing one number guaranteed to be missing from any list. Infinity has a size hierarchy; most people never heard it.

Chris Ofili

Ofili painted the Virgin Mary with a clump of elephant dung as one breast and pornographic collage for her halo. Mayor Giuliani called it 'disgusting' and tried to evict the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.

Kommandokorps

Boys as young as ten are circumcised, sleep in the veld, and recite Afrikaner identity oaths at Kommandokorps camps — a private paramilitary operating openly in the post-apartheid state.

Braid (video game)

Braid's final level reverses time to reveal the princess the player has been chasing is not a captive — she is running from the player. The epilogue text identifies her as the atomic bomb. Jonathan Blow hid this in 2008.

Psittacosaurus

One Psittacosaurus specimen still wears its skin — and that skin shows countershaded stripes, making it the first dinosaur whose actual color pattern has been scientifically confirmed.

Mary Daly

Mary Daly's 1978 'Gyn/Ecology' classified Chinese footbinding, Indian suttee, African genital cutting, Nazi medical experiments, and American gynecology as a single continuous system — all chapters of the same male text written on the female body.

Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton quietly donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University's COVID research — helping fund the Moderna vaccine — then turned down a Tennessee statue in her own honor because she felt she hadn't "earned that right yet."

Dynamite

Alfred Nobel read his own obituary—'merchant of death'—while still alive, then spent his fortune engineering the Peace Prize to rewrite his legacy. The man who perfected mass killing also endowed its antidote.