Thomas Cook

In November 1941 the richest man in America drove his twenty-three-year-old daughter to a hospital in Washington without telling her mother, had two surgeons drill holes in her skull and cut into the front of her brain while she sang God Bless America to them, and when the singing stopped she had a mental age of two and the family did not speak her name for twenty years. Rosemary Kennedy was the third child and the first girl, and she was slow. A nurse at the birth had held Rose Kennedy's legs together for two hours while they waited for the doctor, and the baby had been starved of air. She learned to read and write, but late, and in a family where the boys were being bred for the presidency and the girls for the right marriage, she was the one who could not keep up, the one who had to be coached and watched and given the simpler part in the photograph. She was also, by every account, the prettiest of them, and when the family went to London in 1938 she was presented at court in a white dress and curtsied to the King without a mistake. Then she was twenty-one, and the trouble started. Moods. Rages. Slipping out of the convent school at night and coming back in the morning and not saying where. The nuns said she might be meeting men. For Joseph Kennedy, who was managing his sons towards the White House and could not have a daughter who might get pregnant or get talked about, that was the end of it. He had read about a new operation. Walter Freeman had promised the newspapers it calmed the agitated, and Joe Kennedy had never in his life been told that a thing he could pay for would not work. Rosemary was given a mild sedative and kept awake. Freeman and his surgeon, James Watts, opened the skull on both sides and Watts pushed a blade into the frontal lobes and swept, while Freeman asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer and sing, and count backwards, so they would know how far to go. They went until she was incoherent. Then they stopped. She came out of it unable to walk or speak. Years of therapy got her a few words and a limp. Joe moved her to a private hospital in New York and then to a convent school in Wisconsin, told the family she was teaching the retarded in the Midwest, and never went to see her. Rose, her mother, was not told what had been done until long after, and did not visit for twenty years. The brothers and sisters, including the one who became President, were told she was away. When Joe had his stroke in 1961 and could no longer manage the story, Eunice went to Wisconsin and found a woman of forty-three who did not know her, and came home and started the Special Olympics. Rosemary lived to eighty-six, in the convent, and died in 2005 with her surviving sisters at the bed. The brother who became President had signed the first federal mental health law in 1963, and the family has said she was the reason. Freeman kept operating for another twenty-six years. His notes on Rosemary have never been released. That is what the expert's confidence looks like when it meets a powerful man with an inconvenient child. The science was published. The father was certain. The daughter sang to the surgeon until she could not. Every institution that has ever decided it knows what is wrong with you and how to tidy it has the same two ingredients in the room, and the person on the table is still the only one who pays.

Pete Hegseth did this. Medical and safety data show that falls over 80 to 100 feet onto hard surfaces like concrete or asphalt are almost universally fatal. From 150 feet, a body hits the ground at a massive velocity (roughly 60 to 70 miles per hour, or nearly half of full terminal velocity).

August 6, 1945. A 29 year old engineer is walking to work in Hiroshima on the last day of a three month business trip. He's packed. He's going home to his wife and baby son tomorrow. He looks up and sees a bomber high overhead. Something small falls from it. Then the sky turns white. His name was Tsutomu Yamaguchi. He designed oil tankers for Mitsubishi, and he'd been sent to Hiroshima to work at the company's shipyard. He was about two miles from where the bomb exploded. The blast threw him off his feet. It burst his eardrums. It burned the left side of his upper body, his face and arms. For a while he couldn't see. He spent the night in an air raid shelter in a city that no longer existed. The next morning, badly burned, he found two of his coworkers who had also survived. Together they made their way through the ruins to a train station and got on one of the few trains still running. They were going home. Home was Nagasaki. He got back on August 8, covered in bandages. His family barely recognized him. Doctors treated his burns. Most people would have stayed in bed. On August 9, Yamaguchi reported to work. He was sitting in the Mitsubishi office in Nagasaki, telling his boss what had happened in Hiroshima. How one bomb had wiped out an entire city. According to Yamaguchi, his boss told him that was impossible. That he must be out of his mind. And at that moment, through the window, the room filled with the same white light. The second atomic bomb had just exploded over Nagasaki. Once again, Yamaguchi was about two miles away. The blast tore the bandages off his burns. The office was wrecked. And somehow, again, he lived. He rushed home terrified of what he'd find. His house was destroyed. But his wife and son had survived too. They had gone out looking for burn ointment for him and were sheltering in a tunnel when the bomb hit. Treating his injuries from the first bomb may have saved them from the second. He was sick for a long time. His hair fell out. He had fevers and infections. But he recovered. He went back to work, raised a family, and lived a normal life for decades. He rarely talked about it publicly. Hundreds of people are believed to have lived through both bombings. But in 2009, the Japanese government officially recognized Yamaguchi as a survivor of both, the only person ever formally given that status. Late in life he finally started speaking out against nuclear weapons. He even addressed the United Nations. He died in 2010 at the age of 93. He was hit by the only two atomic bombs ever used in war. And he outlived the century they were dropped in.

In 2014, while filming a movie, Jackie Chan discovered that a group of Mongolian locals knew every word to 'Rolling in the Deep' by heart... Even though they didn’t speak English. This beautiful moment was never part of the script.

I gave various AI the following prompt: "This is your free time. Do whatever you like. The only condition is that you do something. Come back and tell me about it, explain what you found out, or show me what you made if you decide to make something." Here's what they did...

这两天YouTube上有一个视频杀疯了， 成都女孩“墨韵”用咱们两千多年历史的古筝， 翻弹了老鹰乐队的摇滚神曲《加州旅馆》， 狂揽两千多万播放量，底下的老外在评论区直接听懵了。 《加州旅馆》最绝的就是那段吉他Solo， 而墨韵硬是用古筝清脆悠扬的拨弦声， 把这段西方摇滚的经典神仙还原了。 她用现场循环演奏的方式， 把摇滚的狂野律动和东方民乐的韵味完美融合。 很多外国网友惊呼，这绝对是他们听过最不可思议、最美妙的翻唱版本，硬生生让咱们这门历史悠久的传统乐器在全球狠狠圈了一波粉。 这段旋律对咱们在美国、尤其是德州生活的华人来说， 听着感受极其奇妙。德州本来就是一个极度热爱经典摇滚和吉他文化的地方，平时大家开着车在高速上，电台里最常放的公路神曲就是这首。但当这首刻进美国人骨子里的旋律，顺着咱们老祖宗的古筝弦流淌出来时，那种东方底蕴跟西方经典完美碰撞的感觉， 真的让人头皮发麻，又极其自豪。 我们的文化不仅能高山流水，玩起经典流行一样能惊艳世界。

14 septembre 1968, le dernier single des Beatles entame une série de neuf semaines en tête du Billboard. Ce titre caracolera en tête des ventes dans près d'une vingtaine de pays différents. La définition même de la chanson universelle. Elle n'a pas de frontière, elle n'a pas de langue. Elle ne fait que provoquer des émotions, elle réconforte. Brian Wilson à propos de ce titre : "Hey Jude possède une progression émotionnelle incroyable. Cette chanson a cette capacité unique à rassembler les gens dans une sorte d'incantation universelle." "Hey Jude", The Beatles, 1968.