With the rain unrelenting and boredom setting in, Lord Byron proposed a challenge: each guest would write a ghost story to pass the time. That invitation would lead to two of the most influential horror stories ever penned—Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Vampyre by John Polidori.

The monks who crafted the Book of Kells were not cultural tabulae rasae, but rather the inheritors of a complex symbolic language passed down through generations of druids, artisans, and oral poets.

It is remarkable—and revealing—that 2,000 years of Christian tradition have virtually overlooked the evangelist John's declaration that the first act of physicality by the risen Jesus was to receive the embrace of a woman.

When Spanish friars arrived in the Yucatán Peninsula in the 16th century, they encountered a civilization in decline but still vibrant—one that kept intricate calendars, traced the stars, and wrote in a pictographic script of remarkable complexity.

On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld revealed that the Department of Defense couldn't account for a staggering $2.3 trillion. The next morning, that story was buried beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center and the smoking crater in the Pentagon's west wing.