gnostekHeck Thomas200%Violence in the Wild WestDeputy marshal Heck Thomas tracked Bill Doolin through Oklahoma darkness and killed him with a shotgun. Then he propped the outlaw's corpse upright in an open casket for newspaper photographers — proof of payment.+ See More01Thomas killed Doolin on August 25, 1896, firing buckshot into him in a moonlit lane.02Doolin's body was displayed standing in a casket so the press could photograph the dead outlaw.03Thomas had earlier been a Confederate courier at age twelve before becoming a Federal lawman.
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+49‹›1 / 56Egon Schiele200%disturbing art workSchiele painted children in explicit sexual poses, was jailed in 1912 — and the judge burned one drawing in open court as a torch, declaring it pornography. He was 22. The models were sometimes as young as 12.+ See More01A judge burned one of Schiele's drawings by candleflame in open court during his 1912 trial in Neulengbach.02He was held for 24 days before his sentence; during confinement he made 13 drawings documenting his cell.03Several of his young models were between 12 and 14 years old; he had sought parental permission for some sessions.
gnostek‹›1 / 2A Jake and Dinos Chapman fused mannequin piece from the exhibition Come and See at the Serpentine GalleryJake and Dinos Chapman500%Critically acclaimed modern artThe Chapmans bought a complete set of Goya's 'Disasters of War' etchings — 80 prints of dismembered soldiers — and painted Ronald McDonald and clown faces over the victims' heads. They called it 'rectification.'+ See More01The original Goya plates date from 1810–1820; the Chapmans overpainted them in 2003.02They titled the defaced series 'Insult to Injury,' inverting Goya's humanitarian intent entirely.03Jake Chapman said ruining the Goyas was more creative than making new work from scratch.
gnostek‹›1 / 2Endless Ocean: Blue World300%Wii games that make you miss childhoodIn Endless Ocean: Blue World, a player could hover beside a great white shark and hum softly through the controller's microphone until the shark slowed, turned, and drifted away peaceful. Kindness as the only mechanic.+ See More01Players hum into the Wii remote's mic to pacify aggressive sharks — no weapons, no struggle.02The game features over 300 real species, each with naturalist notes written in a diver's field-journal style.03A character named Oceana joins the player on dives, pointing out creatures by name as they pass.
gnostek+41‹›1 / 48A typical crossbowCrossbow1208%Inventions that changed the course of historyThe Second Lateran Council banned the crossbow against Christians in 1139 — the first arms-control treaty in Western history. Knights ignored it, and within a century the bolt had made armor obsolete and chivalry theatrical.+ See More01Pope Innocent II's 1139 ban called the crossbow 'hateful to God and unfit for Christians.'02Richard I of England, who loved the crossbow, died in 1199 from a crossbow bolt at Châlus-Chabrol.03A trained crossbowman needed no years of muscle-building — a peasant could kill a knight on day one.
gnostek‹›1 / 8Alberobello400%Unique buildingsApulian peasants built conical limestone roofs with no mortar so they could be legally dismantled within hours when tax inspectors approached. The roofs reassembled the same day. The Bourbon inspectors kept coming.+ See More01The trulli's drystone construction allowed entire roofs to be collapsed in under an hour to evade the Kingdom of Naples tax census.02Alberobello's trulli district contains over 1,500 of these structures, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.03The conical pinnacles on each roof bear whitewashed symbols — pagan, Christian, or astrological — whose meanings are locally disputed.
gnostek‹›1 / 2Sadao Munemori400%Japanese Unit 442Sadao Munemori dove onto a live grenade in Italy, April 1945, absorbing the blast and saving two soldiers. He was the only Japanese American to receive the Medal of Honor during the war — but his family was in an internment camp.+ See More01Munemori's Medal of Honor was awarded in 1946 — but posthumously upgraded medals for 21 others took until 2000.02His mother received his Medal of Honor while still living behind barbed wire at Manzanar.03He was the sole Japanese American to receive the Medal of Honor during World War II itself, not retroactively.
gnostek‹›1 / 2Sodder children disappearance600%Strange disappearancesFive Sodder children disappeared in a Christmas Eve fire in 1945 in Fayetteville, West Virginia. Fire investigators found no bone fragments in the ash. Their mother ran a billboard on US-119 for 40 years asking where they were.+ See More01The fire ladder was missing from its hook the night of the fire; the phone line had been cut.02A private investigator sent the family a photograph in 1967 of a young man he claimed was Louis Sodder — no follow-up ever confirmed it.03Human bodies, even cremated, leave 3–9 lbs of bone fragments; the Sodder ash contained none from five children.