“Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.” – Robert Anton Wilson Imagine going out on a routine excavation. Perhaps not even related to any academic study. It could just be surveying for a construction project. The dig starts, and instead of just finding the usual rocks and soil, the workers…
Author: Dustin Koski
Dustin Koski
Dustin Koski is the proud co-writer and producer of the anthology podcast The Vanishing Point with his brother Adam. He still hopes to escape from Wisconsin someday.
In an age of seemingly endless wars where nations can no longer even way when they’ve achieved objectives, let alone satisfying victories, it’s tempting for military students to look to the past. Historians have drawn us neat, definitive maps and provided definitive starts and end dates. What’s more, it brings with it the vicarious sense…
Outnumbered, cut off from any hope of rescue or support, operating secretly. The dramatic potential of troops or pilots conducting a raid has been well explored by film, television, and literature. The scenario even offers all the, for want of a better word, “fun” of being in the military without many of the responsibilities, such…
We’re so used to pop culture providing stories of ragtag bands of brothers with lowest-bidder equipment overcoming vast legions with sophisticated weaponry that we can lose sight of just how rare those situations are. Plenty of articles have been devoted to that subject, and way too many give the ending away in the title that…
The homogenizing effect of mass media is a mixed bag. It’s certainly handy for owners of intellectual properties that their fictional characters be immediately recognizable to audiences worldwide. It’s also a small shame to see imaginations have such rigid guidelines on the appearances of characters. How fun it is to imagine the ways different cultures…
It’s common practice to refer to horror films where there were significant problems during production as “cursed.” The streaming service Shudder has an entire series devoted to this concept. As it happens, focusing on events surrounding horror movies exclusively is unnecessary. You can find uncanny occurrences across all genres. We’ll be looking both behind the…
Even more than two decades after the World Trade Center was destroyed, it remains the defining event of the 21st Century. For years it made terrorism the fear in the forefront of the cultural consciousness. It also completely overshadowed centuries of terrorist activity, and in the process contributed to a highly skewed vision of the…
Today the religiously and socially conservative nation of Saudi Arabia is not only located in the middle of the world geographically, but in the middle of horribly charged controversies. For instance, airstrikes against Yemen, its neighbor on the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, have killed an estimated 24,000 people and deeply implicated allies such…
There was a time where it was thought that an unseemly or illegal sexual relationship could sink the aspirations for anyone seeking the highest office in the United States of America. Somehow this belief survived 1992, and seemed to stay intact right up to 2016, when it was dispelled forever. Looking back through storied American…
“We romanticize swords so much. Imagine everyone is swinging tire irons at each other.” – John Dolan Anyone who tries to conceptualize military engagements from a millenia or two ago is going to have their impression heavily shaped by influences that themselves were heavily influenced by fantasists, such as pulp fantasy painter Frank Frazetta. It’s difficult not…
“We romanticize swords so much. Imagine everyone is swinging tire irons at each other.” – John Dolan Anyone who tries to conceptualize military engagements from a millenia or two ago is going to have their impression heavily shaped by influences that themselves were heavily influenced by fantasists, such as pulp fantasy painter Frank Frazetta. It’s…
We’re so used to pop culture providing stories of ragtag bands of brothers with lowest bidder equipment overcoming vast legions with sophisticated weaponry that we can lose sight of just how rare those situations are in real life. Plenty of articles have been devoted to that subject, and way too many give the ending away…
In 1913, French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann studied people playing tug of war. His studies resulted in the observation of the Ringelmann Effect. It posits that the more individuals or groups are involved in an action, the less effort exerted by any individual unit. After all, there’s less blame that will be put on any…
We’re quite used to the clean historical model of humans evolving from some manner of uncivilized, famished, desperate individuals to the well-nourished and civilized beings we know today. We’ve progressed from a series of despotisms into sophisticated republics, democracies, collectives, and so on. Except it’s not that simple. Many times through history a society was…
Inspirational quotes about making mistakes are so ubiquitous that they fill entire books, not to mention all those stories of how inventions or other discoveries came about by accident. Well, time to look at the other side of the coin: mistakes where the brunt of the cost was borne by thousands, maybe millions of people…
The Washington Post reported in 2015 that while the United States has 5% of the world’s population it has 22% of its reported prison population. Between 0.7% and 1% of all Americans are incarcerated at any given time. Thus for many, many Americans the harsh realities of prison life are directly or indirectly a significant…
Religious conflict is often viewed as a major source of violent deaths in human history. The 2012 book Encyclopedia of Wars by Charles Phillips and Alex Axelrod lists 123 conflicts that were, ostensibly, primarily religiously-motivated, from the Crusades to the Taiping Rebellion. Considering that the Taiping Rebellion in particular took over 13 million lives, the…
Right now, the populations of many nations have levels of trust in their governments that are the lowest they’ve been in decades. For example in the United Kingdom, the British Social Attitudes Survey reported in October 2020 that only 15% of respondents believed that they trusted their government most of the time or always, less…
Average smartphone use has climbed so high that, as Vox reported in December 2020, when major tech companies like Facebook and Google tried to implement services to moderate daily use by their customers, the efforts were unsuccessful. If even the very entities that stand to profit from constant online engagement admit there is a problem,…
The Washington Post reported in 2015 that while the United States has 5% of the world’s population it has 22% of its reported prison population. Between 0.7% and 1% of all Americans are incarcerated at any given time. Thus for many, many Americans the harsh realities of prison life are directly or indirectly a significant…
What does the average person know about Babylon? Probably they’ve heard the phrase “whore of Babylon.” They also know of them as villains from the Bible for bringing one of God’s punishments to Israel. Maybe they’ll remember something about Hammurabi’s Code of Laws from history class, or playing Civilization if they like video games. There’s…
As of 2021, American workers are proving by the millions per month to be unwilling to work jobs with low wages, limited benefits, uncertainty over hours, and such drawbacks. Yet for all that, lack of recognition has been the most consistently cited cause for ending employment. All sorts of jobs that were dubbed “essential” in…
In his 1865 poem “When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer,” Walt Whitman describes how listening to the proofs and figures of astronomy leaves him less fulfilled than when he “Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” While TopTenz doesn’t really agree with the idea that facts and figures inherently drain the wondrousness of the universe,…
According to current, generally accepted models, the universe emerged from a point smaller than an atom between 11.4 billion and 13.8 billion years ago. These conclusions were broadly arrived at by taking energy readings from stars for rates of decay and other energy processes and then extrapolating where they are in the process, like the…