Author: Dustin Koski

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…

According to a 2017 study conducted by the American Psychological Association, the average museum-goer will regard a painting generally considered a masterpiece for 27 seconds, though the median amount of time that a person studied one was for 17 seconds. That might seem like evidence that social media and mobile devices have ruined our attention…

Many Americans are trying to keep the “Manifest Destiny” and “Great Person” theories of US history going. They want the United States of America’s creation to have been some result of divine forces so that more people treat it with fervor, if not reverence. This view of American history is especially desirable when issues such…

Many times, both major political parties in America said that the 2020 election was the most important of all-time. The Biden campaign claimed that “the soul of the nation” was at stake. Trump said a Biden win would make the nation go socialist. For all that fuss, a lot of issues that are literally life…

According to CNBC, in January 2021 an average of 6.6 million shares of stock were traded every day on Wall Street. As of September 2020, the total value of the US stock exchange is estimated at roughly $36 trillion. So whether you believe it’s a necessary component of the free market or a casino run…

Just below the surface of our polite society, it’s not really a surprise for many of us that there are doomsday cults. A 2020 study by BioMed Central Geriatrics found that roughly 1.25% of people had persistent death wishes, and that was among people who did not have underlying mental illnesses. Of even that group…