When we think of animals that will destroy us, rend us limb from limb, and leave us in a bloody mess, we usually thing of the huge and horrifying. Which means we forget about the real threats: the tiny, the cute, the gorgeous. The animals at which we ooh and aaah over, but are deadly, […]
Continue readingMartin Luther King, Jr. was an American clergyman, humanitarian, activist, and leader of the African American civil rights movement born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. King is a prominent figure in American history and iconic for his words and actions in promoting civil rights within the United States and in many other countries. […]
Continue readingThe life of an author — particularly an author of fiction – is necessarily connected to that which is most dangerous: our consciousness. It is often through the exploratory process of creative literature that we touch the exciting possibilities and subversive consequences of our capacities as a species. Yet for all of the grandiose ways […]
Continue readingPirates! They weren’t all Johnny Depp-swaying, dainty and witty denizens of the sea. Though they’ve been with us from the ancient world to the present wave of Somalian ship hijackings, most pirates were a 17th-century phenomenon whose short careers ended bloodily, leaving behind rumors of their fearsome beards as much as of their actual material […]
Continue readingAside from catching chicken pox as a kid, nobody would ever go out of their way to get sick. Why would they? The best you can hope for is a few days off from work, and really, playing hooky isn’t as fun since Bob Barker stopped hosting The Price Is Right. However, there are a […]
Continue readingThe cliché goes that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but some photographs eschew any such numeric limitation and go on talking to us forever; certain photo portraits have that rare power. Far more than pictorial representations of celebrated or instantly recognizable figures, they capture so much more, seeming to encapsulate not simply the […]
Continue readingWhen you run experiments, there’s inherently an element of the unknown. After all, we’re trying to figure out things we don’t know. And sometimes, things go wrong. FATALLY WRONG! Here are some of the most interesting, most intriguing, and sometimes most horrific, experimental deaths we’ve ever heard of. 15. Those magnificent men and their flying […]
Continue readingBeing diagnosed with any incurable disease is misfortune enough, but society for some reason looks upon the diagnoses of rare diseases as a special kind of grim fate dealt by the universe, the house which always wins. But sometimes — a one in ten million or more sometimes — a person is stricken with a […]
Continue readingEveryone thinks they’re too smart to fall for a scam until it happens to them. No matter how sure you are that you can spot a con, sometimes it just takes you by surprise. It doesn’t have to be a flashy stock market swindle; it can happen when you’re just walking down the street. Street […]
Continue readingPaul of Tarsus Saul of Tarsus, a.k.a. Paul the Apostle, Paul of Tarsus [?-65 c.e.] was a Hellenistic Jew and student of Gamaliel the Elder who served as enforcer for the Pharisaic Sanhedrin against the apostate Christian sect following the crucifixion of Jesus. Around 33 c.e. he experienced a dramatic conversion experience while on the […]
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