The Gonzo life of Hunter S Thompson
In 2005, on a Colorado mountainside, a 153-foot cannon shaped like a double-thumbed fist fired a man's ashes into the sky while fireworks exploded and Mr. Tambourine Man played over loudspeakers, a $3...
10 Jun 24min
The Golden Cage of Yuri Gagarin
April 12, 1961: a man in a bright orange pressure suit drifts down by parachute into a Kazakh farm field, having just become the first human to survive the vacuum of space. He is instantly the most fa...
10 Jun 48min
The Gladiator Emperor Who Ruined Rome
In the blood-soaked sand of the Colosseum, the Emperor of Rome held a crescent dart in one hand and the severed head of an ostrich in the other, then walked to the senators' seats and gestured: you're...
10 Jun 24min
The Genius Behind Computers and the Bomb
Your smartphone, the weather forecast you checked this morning, and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction all trace back to one mind. John von Neumann mastered calculus at eight, memorized phon...
10 Jun 20min
The floating stone machine of Angkor Wat
Up to 10 million sandstone blocks, perfectly oriented to mirror the cosmos: Angkor Wat is a 400-acre scale model of the Hindu universe, with five towers for the peaks of Mount Meru and a moat for the ...
10 Jun 21min
The first woman to map the cosmos
She stood four foot three, scarred by childhood typhus and blind in one eye, and her own mother deliberately blocked her education to guarantee a life of household servitude. That woman became the fir...
10 Jun 21min
The first female doctor hated medicine
The first female physician in the United States initially found medicine repulsive. Elizabeth Blackwell couldn't stand the sight of disease, but when a dying friend told her that her suffering would h...
10 Jun 19min
The Fifty Three Million Pound Securitas Heist
Picture standing in a vault staring at 154 million pounds in cash, and having to walk away from every penny of it because your 7.5-ton getaway truck is already packed to the ceiling with 53 million. T...
10 Jun 26min
