Frederick Lorz

Original Soviet space dog environmentally controlled safety module used on sub-orbital and orbital spaceflights

Tupac Shakur (right) and The Notorious B.I.G. (left), the two main figures of the East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry, prior to the conflict in 1993 in Los Angeles. The image was also used in the 2002 feature-length documentary film…

Fred Lorz crossed the 1904 Olympic marathon finish line first, accepted the gold medal from Alice Roosevelt, then admitted a car had driven him 11 of the 26 miles. He claimed it was a joke.

Soviet space dogs

The USSR launched at least 57 dogs into space between 1951 and 1966; strays from Moscow streets were preferred because they were deemed psychologically tougher, and most early flights were explicitly one-way.

Liu Ziye

Liu Ziye forced his own aunts into his imperial harem, declared them imperial concubines, then was stabbed to death by a palace servant at sixteen — his ministers had arranged the blade.

Kate Millett

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.

Mellified man

Elderly Arab men, per medieval accounts, volunteered to subsist entirely on honey until their flesh was saturated — then, after death and 100 years of submersion in honey, their preserved corpses were sold as medicine.

East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry

By 1997, two of rap's biggest figures were dead and their labels were in ruin. What began as promotional rivalry between Death Row and Bad Boy became geography that determined whose side you were on at gunpoint.

Thomas DeSimone

Tommy DeSimone — Joe Pesci's model for Tommy DeVito — was lured to what he believed was his formal mob induction in January 1979 and strangled the moment he walked through the door.

Nixon shock

On a Sunday night in August 1971, Nixon told the world — and blindsided every allied government — that dollars were no longer redeemable for gold. The Bretton Woods system died in a 15-minute TV address.

Agathocles of Syracuse

Besieged in Syracuse, Agathocles loaded 14,000 men onto ships and invaded Carthage directly — turning his own siege inside out. He reputedly drank from enemy skulls and rose from a potter's wheel to a throne.