In an era when major AAA games routinely cost hundreds of millions to make, the Pokémon franchise quietly went in the different direction. Leaked internal documents and financial reports suggest Game Freak has managed to sustain a blockbuster franchise on remarkably lean budgets—only to generate returns so high they
Long before the Olympics became a spectacle of branding and biomechanics, they celebrated beauty as much as speed. Between 1912 and 1948, the Games included official competitions in painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and literature. Artists stood alongside athletes, submitting works inspired by sport—bronze statues, symphonies, poems, and stadium designs.
Every religion has its mystics, but few celebrate madness as holiness. In Eastern Orthodoxy, the “Fool for Christ” was a paradox—a saint who renounced logic, comfort, and social order to live in deliberate absurdity. They preached naked in snow, mocked emperors, and taunted priests. To the sane world they
Before credit cards and carbon offsets, there was a system that treated virtue like currency. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church built what might be called the first financial infrastructure of the soul: the treasury of merit. It was a cosmic account, stocked with the infinite goodness of Christ
In an age when exploration is measured in satellites and server racks, the idea of the lone adventurer feels quaint. Yet a century ago, a six-foot-seven Dane with a walrus moustache and a philosopher’s pen carved his way out of a snow-buried hut using a knife fashioned from his
In 1945, as the ruins of Europe still smoked, a young lawyer stood before the Nuremberg tribunal and charged not merely men but a civilization. Benjamin Ferencz, the 27-year-old chief prosecutor at the Einsatzgruppen Trial—often called the biggest murder trial in history—argued that justice must be built, not
Centuries before Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, an astronomer imagined traveling to the Moon. In 1608, Johannes Kepler wrote Somnium—“The Dream”—a fictional account of lunar astronomy narrated through a daemon’s voyage. The claim is simple and radical: Somnium reads like the first modern science-fiction story, a
For six weeks in the winter of 1937, Imperial Japanese troops entered Nanking, then the capital of China. What followed remains one of the most contested atrocities of the twentieth century. Between 40,000 and 300,000 civilians were killed—depending on who is counting. The Nanking Massacre was more
Before NASA, there was the Vatican Observatory. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar and gave the modern world the rhythm of “A.D.” time itself. The Church’s historical struggle with astronomy was never truly a war on science—it was a contest for the ownership of heaven.
The Philosopher Who Never Said “Superman” Hitler reportedly kept a copy of Nietzsche on his desk—but the philosopher of freedom never wrote the ideology that later borrowed his name. Friedrich Nietzsche, who sought to liberate the mind from herd morality, became posthumously chained to one of history’s darkest
Once the battlefield was land, then oil—now it is attention. Psychonomics is the economics of the mind, tracing how thought itself became a commodity. In early-1900s Vienna, Freud monetized introspection; psychoanalysis became the prototype of a therapy industry. Every era since has turned psychology into a market, from the
The Gallery with No Names North Korea’s greatest artists are ghosts—unknown, uncredited, unseen beyond their borders. At the center stands the Mansudae Art Studio, one of the world’s largest art production houses, established in 1959 and often described as employing thousands. Pyongyang’s painters are both state