Sack of Rome (455)

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Red Bird – watercolour on paper

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3D illustration of Gabriel's horn

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Vandals spent two weeks stripping Rome in 455 CE — not burning it, but methodically prying gilded bronze roof tiles off the Temple of Jupiter and loading them onto ships. Even the empress's jewelry walked out the door.

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.

At a 2006 Hollywood book signing, Paris Hilton's pet kinkajou Baby Luv bit clean through her arm, sending her to Cedars-Sinai — a rainforest carnivore on a red carpet.

Gabriel's Horn — the surface generated by rotating y=1/x — holds exactly π cubic units of paint, yet its inner wall has infinite area. Pour the paint in; it fills. Try to coat the walls; you never finish.

Kate Millett's 'Sexual Politics' (1970) read D.H. Lawrence's and Henry Miller's sex scenes as political documents — finding in their prose the grammar of female subordination. Miller's publishers had called him a liberator.

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations in Greek, on military campaign, with no intention of publishing. The book — private, furious, self-lacerating — survived because someone ignored his wishes.

Bokassa fed political prisoners to his private crocodiles and lions, then had himself crowned emperor in a ceremony copying Napoleon's — in a country where per-capita income was under $400 a year.

Christine Jorgensen's 1952 surgery in Copenhagen ran above the fold on the New York Daily News front page, displacing Korean War coverage — a former Army private from the Bronx who became the face of a possibility millions had never heard named.

In 2014, Isnilon Hapilon pledged bayah — formal oath of allegiance — to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, absorbing his Abu Sayyaf faction into the Islamic State's caliphate project. The pledge turned a kidnap-for-ransom gang into an ISIS province.