Author: Dustin Koski

The People’s Republic of China and its dominant party, the Chinese Communist Party, can be  trickier to place on the political compass than it might seem. While it’s famous for state-owned businesses, in 2019 the National Bureau of Statistics reported that 84% of its businesses are privately owned, which was part of a 78% uptick…

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…

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…

Americans will never stop fearing crime on a profound, primal level. Their news media will make sure of that. Even if crime in their region drops to zero, they will fear that the nation at large is on a slippery slope. A 2019 gallup poll showed that while 38% of people believed that crime was…

Animals seem like they shouldn’t be that complicated. “Animalistic” is generally shorthand for being simplistic, if not savage. Yet there are shades to their mentality as varied as there are in human societies. There are also complexities and surprises in their relationship to humanity. Domesticated or feral, invertebrate or vertebrate, the animal kingdom is a…

Americans will never stop fearing crime on a profound, primal level. Their news media will make sure of that. Even if crime in their region drops to zero, they will fear that the nation at large is on a slippery slope. A 2019 gallup poll showed that while 38% of people believed that crime was…

The Iron Age is generally accepted to have been the final age before solid, written history in the development of human society. This doesn’t mean that a society arriving at Iron Age was necessarily a sign of progress. That’s just one of the many counterintuitive things to be learned about this period, or rather these…

Animals seem like they shouldn’t be that complicated. “Animalistic” is generally shorthand for being simplistic, if not savage. Yet there are shades to their mentality as varied as there are in human societies. There are also complexities and surprises in their relationship to humanity. Domesticated or feral, invertebrate or vertebrate, the animal kingdom is a…

The image of sailors as being particularly mentally unbalanced has a surprising degree of official confirmation. As far back as 1815, Sir Gilbert Blaine, the Royal Navy’s Physician of the Fleet and the Prince Regent’s personal doctor, reported that sailors were roughly seven times more likely to go mad than the general population. Considering the…

Today when your average person is asked to imagine a Druid, their mental picture is probably a sinister hooded figure that belongs in a cult. So what insidious schemes did they carry out for the Celtic peoples settled from Ireland to France? What ghastly rituals did they perform  to invoke dark aid or for routine?…

The Iron Age is generally accepted to have been the final age before solid, written history in the development of human society. This doesn’t mean that a society arriving at Iron Age was necessarily a sign of progress. That’s just one of the many counterintuitive things to be learned about this period, or rather these…

Let’s get this out of the way before we really get started: of course no one needs to be told that a coalition of states that was formed largely to keep four million Black people in bondage won’t be good for that group. What’s been forgotten, even by those that are working to whitewash more…

Is there any greater irony than an authority figure harming those they’re trying to look after through a safety measure? A penguin parent smothering their hatchlings through protectiveness. Ed Gein’s mother psychologically warped him in an attempt to keep him free from sin. The entries on this list all had equally counterintuitive results, and in most cases…

Some days, we as humans can find even our own anatomy a little perplexing. The extra bumps and ridges, the body parts you don’t even think about until they start acting up. If someone were to go from considering that to these animals, their head would really begin to spin. In the cases of the…

The image of sailors as being particularly mentally unbalanced has a surprising degree of official confirmation. As far back as 1815, Sir Gilbert Blaine, the Royal Navy’s Physician of the Fleet and the Prince Regent’s personal doctor, reported that sailors were roughly seven times more likely to go mad than the general population. Considering the…

Is there any greater irony than an authority figure harming those they’re trying to look after through a safety measure? A penguin parent smothering their hatchlings through protectiveness. Ed Gein’s mother psychologically warped him in an attempt to keep him free from sin. The entries on this list all had equally counterintuitive results, and in…

It’s the largest hot desert in the world. At 3.5 million square miles, it’s over half a million more in size than all of Australia. If you were to combine all the deserts in North America with Asia’s Gobi Desert, you could still fit three of those combined deserts inside the Sahara, and likely be…

In 2021, the US Air Force announced that in order to drive recruitment it would resort to propping up veterans as social media influencers. It’s questionable how effective that will be, even more so after TopTenz helps spread the word about why the US Armed Forces aren’t something people should want to join if they…

Today a pound of smokeless gunpowder generally costs $25 in the United States, which would be enough for around 175 rounds in a hunting rifle. But we’re looking back to an era when gunpowder was so new and so unlike anything that had come before it that it could be mistaken for a deadly miracle.…

It’s the largest hot desert in the world. At 3.5 million square miles, it’s over half a million more in size than all of Australia. If you were to combine all the deserts in North America with Asia’s Gobi Desert, you could still fit three of those combined deserts inside the Sahara, and likely be…

Some days, we as humans can find even our own anatomy a little perplexing. The extra bumps and ridges, the body parts you don’t even think about until they start acting up. If someone were to go from considering that to these animals, their head would really begin to spin. In the cases of the…

Today a pound of smokeless gunpowder generally costs $25 in the United States, which would be enough for around 175 rounds in a hunting rifle. But we’re looking back to an era when gunpowder was so new and so unlike anything that had come before it that it could be mistaken for a deadly miracle.…

There’s a common impression that people in the past were less intelligent than they are today, since beliefs were widespread back then which are almost universally dismissed today. Yet John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin reported in 2011 that over the last 20,000 years, the average size of a human brain shrunk from 1,500…

John Lyly’s proverb “All’s fair in love and war” hasn’t resonated so much since he wrote it in his 1578 novel Euphues for no reason. A commander would be in a pretty difficult situation if they had to explain that they let an enemy inflict losses on them out of some abstruse sense of fairplay.…