Black Sox Scandal

The eight "Chicago Black Sox"

The epitome of the Rohan Master's art is the " Lamentation of the Virgin " (f. 135, Pl. 57) from the Hours of the Cross. The grieving Virgin cannot be consoled by the Apostle John , who looks up in consternation at a saddened God.

01Downer's arrest came after she showed women their own cervices using a plastic speculum and a flashlight at a Los Angeles feminist health clinic.
02The prosecution's key exhibit was a jar of yogurt Downer had inserted into a woman's vagina as a yeast infection remedy — the 'yogurt case.'
03Her 1972 acquittal was cited in the founding documents of the women's self-help health movement, which spread to 50 cities within three years.

Facsimile of the Einstein–Szilard letter

Coat of arms of the Indies Company, with the reclining figure representing the Mississippi River taken from Law's Compagnie d'Occident , and the motto Florebo quocumque ferar taken from Louis XIV's East India Company

Temperature map of the cosmic microwave background measured by the Planck spacecraft

Black Sox Scandal

Eight Chicago White Sox players were paid by gamblers to lose the 1919 World Series — then played the following full season undetected. Shoeless Joe Jackson, who batted .375 in the fixed series, was banned for life.

Marshall Applewhite

Marshall Applewhite convinced 38 members to voluntarily castrate themselves, then drink phenobarbital-laced pudding to 'shed their containers' and board a spacecraft trailing Comet Hale-Bopp. Five had already been surgically castrated.

Rohan Hours

In the Rohan Hours, painted around 1420, a skeletal dying man lies naked on bare ground while God leans down from the sky to address him directly — a private conversation between a mortal and the divine, held across a page smaller than a hardback book.

Carol Downer

In 1972, Carol Downer was arrested for practicing medicine without a license. Her crime: inserting a speculum into another woman's vagina so she could see her own cervix for the first time. She was acquitted after an eight-day trial.

Einstein–Szilard letter

Two physicists — Einstein and Szilárd — mailed Roosevelt a single page in August 1939. Roosevelt read it, wrote 'This requires action,' and set in motion the Manhattan Project, which employed 130,000 people.

John Law's Company

John Law — a Scottish gambler who killed a man in a duel — convinced France to replace gold with paper backed by Louisiana swampland. Within two years, the word 'millionaire' was coined, then the crash.

Tarrare

Tarrare, an 18th-century French soldier, ate live cats, eels, snakes, and a 14-month-old toddler — then vanished from a hospital ward. His autopsy revealed a stomach cavity large enough to fit a small child.

Murder of Zebb Quinn

Zebb Quinn, 18, vanished after a late-night work errand in January 2000. His car turned up days later with a live puppy inside and a lipstick kiss on the rear window. His coworker Robert Jason Owens was convicted 17 years later.

Cosmic microwave background

The faint hiss on an analog TV is partly photons from 380,000 years after the Big Bang — the CMB, discovered accidentally in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson while trying to eliminate 'noise.'