Schopenhauer called the post-orgasm moment of clarity as “devil’s laughter” because it’s when we realize we’re slaves to a biological imperative uncaring of our happiness
Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th-century philosopher best known for making even Nietzsche seem like an optimist, had a particularly bleak take on human existence. Life, he argued, was little more than a cruel joke played by an indifferent universe, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the moments immediately following orgasm. He called it the devil’s laughter—that sudden, crushing moment of clarity when you realize that, just seconds ago, you were a marionette dancing on the strings of biology, wholly possessed by forces that care nothing for your long-term happiness.
To Schopenhauer, sex wasn’t about love, passion, or even pleasure—it was the iron grip of nature forcing you into compliance. In those brief post-coital moments, the fog lifts, and you’re left with the unsettling awareness that your desires weren’t really yours at all. You were just another pawn in the endless, indifferent cycle of reproduction, tricked into believing that chasing pleasure was the same thing as pursuing meaning. And now? Now you sit there, spent, blinking into the void, wondering how something that felt so urgent moments ago suddenly seems ridiculous—or worse, irrelevant.
It’s a bleak take, sure, but Schopenhauer wasn’t exactly in the business of selling hope. He was pointing to something deeper: the idea that much of what drives us—ambition, lust, even love—might not be as personal or profound as we’d like to think. That our most intense desires aren’t grand pursuits of fulfillment but merely biological programming wearing the mask of free will. And if you find that depressing, well, congratulations—you’ve just had your first real Schopenhauer moment.
André the Giant has successfully held the record for the most Beer consumed in a single sitting for the last 40 years. During a six-hour period back in 1976, André drank 119 standard 12 ounce brews in a pub in Pennsylvania
There are tall tales, and then there are André the Giant tales—except the latter tend to be true, verified, and still somehow unbelievable. Case in point: the time André Roussimoff, the 7-foot-4, 500-pound behemoth of professional wrestling and general larger-than-life existence, set a record that has stood unchallenged for nearly half a century. The year was 1976, the setting was a quiet pub in Pennsylvania, and the goal—well, there wasn’t one, really. André was simply drinking because that’s what André did. And by the time he was done, he had consumed 119 standard 12-ounce beers in a six-hour span. That’s not a misprint. That’s not an urban legend. That’s an actual event that occurred in recorded human history.
To put that into perspective, imagine standing in front of ten cases of beer and thinking, I could probably take down all of these before closing time. Now imagine actually doing it, all while maintaining a level of composure that only a man with hands the size of catcher’s mitts and an alcohol tolerance that bordered on mythological could manage. The pub didn’t run out of beer that night, but it’s likely their supply took a severe dent. And André? He presumably went about his evening as if he had just finished a light refreshment, proving once again that the laws of physics—and human biology—simply didn’t apply to him.
North Korea once kidnapped a famous South Korean film director to create Fantasy films for the North Korean Government. Kim Jong-Il was a lifelong admirer of Godzilla and together, they made a North Korean version of it called “Pulgasari”.
If Kim Jong-Il had been born anywhere else, he probably would have spent his days lurking in the back rows of kaiju film festivals, offering unsolicited commentary on miniature city destruction techniques. But because he was born into North Korea’s ruling dynasty, he had the kind of creative control that most frustrated cinephiles can only dream of. And when you have unchecked power and an obsession with Godzilla, what do you do? Well, if you’re Kim Jong-Il, you orchestrate the kidnapping of a famous South Korean director and force him to make the kaiju film of your dreams.
This is not a rejected Mission: Impossible plot. This actually happened. In the late 1970s, South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee were abducted, courtesy of the North Korean regime, and presented with their new executive producer—Kim Jong-Il himself. What followed was years of captivity and coerced filmmaking, culminating in Pulgasari, North Korea’s homegrown kaiju epic, a state-funded attempt at a monster movie with all the subtlety of a missile parade. The film, meant to be a thinly veiled anti-capitalist fable, is basically Godzilla meets Marxist propaganda, with a giant, horned beast that starts as a tiny, rice-bowl-sized creature before growing into a hulking metal-eating juggernaut.
Kim, of course, was reportedly very hands-on in the process, proving himself to be the most meddlesome studio exec in the history of meddlesome studio execs. And while Pulgasari remains a bizarre footnote in film history, the real Hollywood ending came later—Shin and Choi eventually escaped, defecting while on a trip to Vienna. Meanwhile, Kim Jong-Il, the world’s only dictator-slash-film producer, continued to live out his cinematic fantasies in the confines of his hermit kingdom, proving that sometimes the scariest monster is the one sitting in the director’s chair.
Gustav Klimt – Die Jungfrau (1913)
For a man whose entire career was built on peeling back the layers of charm to reveal something deeper, darker, and occasionally unhinged, Jack Nicholson’s own origin story reads like the kind of psychological twist you’d expect from a film he might have starred in. Imagine going through the first 37 years of your life believing one fundamental truth about your family, only to find out that reality was—well, not quite as advertised.
Nicholson, Hollywood’s perennial bad boy with a devilish grin and a glint of mischief in his eyes, grew up thinking his grandmother, Ethel May, was his mother, and his actual mother, June, was his sister. This wasn’t some elaborate ruse for dramatic effect—it was the kind of well-intentioned deception that was common in an era when the stigma of illegitimacy weighed heavily. June was only 18 when she had Jack in 1937, and rather than let the world—or more importantly, their conservative town in New Jersey—judge her, the family made a collective decision: Ethel May would raise Jack as her own, and June would play the role of the doting older sister.
Nicholson didn’t uncover the truth until 1974, when a Time magazine journalist researching a profile on him unearthed the real story. By then, both June and Ethel May had passed away, leaving Jack with the kind of revelation that even Hollywood screenwriters might have considered too melodramatic. His reaction? Classic Nicholson—he took it in stride, with an almost eerie acceptance, later saying, “It was a pretty dramatic event, but it wasn’t what I’d call traumatizing… I was pretty well psychologically formed.”
Maybe that’s why Nicholson always had an uncanny ability to tap into characters who embodied both charisma and chaos. Maybe, deep down, he always knew the world wasn’t as simple as it seemed. Or maybe, just maybe, he was the one guy in Hollywood cool enough to shake off a revelation that would have sent most people into years of therapy.
In 1994 the CEOs of the seven biggest tobacco firms testified before Congress that “nicotine was not addictive” despite overwhelming scientific evidence
If you were watching C-SPAN on April 14, 1994, you witnessed a moment so brazen, so performatively self-assured, that it felt less like a congressional hearing and more like the climactic scene of a courtroom drama where the villains deliver their lines with complete conviction—right before the third act twist exposes them. On that day, the CEOs of the seven largest tobacco companies sat before Congress, raised their right hands, and, in a collective display of corporate gaslighting, testified under oath that nicotine was not addictive.
Let’s be clear: by 1994, the evidence that nicotine was addictive wasn’t just strong—it was overwhelming. The Surgeon General had declared nicotine addictive as far back as 1988. Internal tobacco industry documents, later uncovered, showed that companies had known this for decades and had even researched ways to make cigarettes more addictive. But none of that stopped the seven men—dubbed the “Seven Dwarfs” by some critics—from putting on their best poker faces and sticking to the script. They answered with identical, rehearsed statements, each one solemnly declaring, “I believe nicotine is not addictive.”
This wasn’t just denial; it was an industrial-scale attempt to rewrite reality, the kind of thing you’d expect in a dystopian novel, not a congressional hearing. And yet, it worked—for a while. Big Tobacco had spent years building a fortress of lobbyists, lawyers, and PR campaigns, all designed to keep the industry alive and profitable. It took another four years before the dam finally broke, with the $206 billion Master Settlement Agreement and the eventual revelation that, yes, the industry had not only known about nicotine’s addictive properties but had actively manipulated cigarette formulas to enhance them.
In hindsight, the 1994 hearing stands as one of the great performances in corporate deception—except unlike Jack Nicholson’s testimony in A Few Good Men, no one snapped under pressure. They just lied, with a straight face, on national television, knowing that billions of dollars were on the line. And for a brief moment, they almost got away with it.
A study titled “Where Are They Now?” in 1978 followed up on 515 people who were prevented from attempting suicide using the Golden Gate Bridge from 1937 to 1971. About 90% were either alive or had died of natural causes, concluding “suicidal behavior is crisis-oriented” rather than inexorable
In the long history of scientific studies that prove things people don’t really want to believe, the 1978 paper Where Are They Now? sits in a category of its own. The study examined 515 individuals who had been physically prevented from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge between 1937 and 1971—people who, in the moment, had seen death as the only way forward. What happened to them? Did they find another way to end their lives? Did they spiral deeper into despair? Did they prove, as some cynics argued, that if someone really wants to die, they’ll find a way?
No, actually. They didn’t. About 90% of them were still alive or had died of natural causes decades later.
The study’s conclusion was simple but profound: suicidal behavior is crisis-oriented. It’s not some irreversible, preordained path. For most people who attempt, suicide isn’t the end of a long, carefully plotted journey—it’s a moment. A terrifying, desperate moment, but still just a moment. And moments pass.
It’s a striking rebuke to the fatalistic idea that suicide is inevitable, that people who are stopped from jumping today will just find another way to do it tomorrow. The data says otherwise. The study suggests that when you interrupt that one moment—when you get someone past right now—they often don’t go back. They live. They build lives they might never have imagined when standing on that bridge. And maybe, years later, they even look back, astonished that they ever believed there was no other way forward.
When Rockstar first released Grand Theft Auto, they actually paid reviewers to negatively review the game in order to keep it controversial, and therefore popular. They targeted right wing news papers to ensure moral outrage and drive the game to success.
In what might be one of the most beautifully cynical marketing moves in gaming history, Rockstar Games—back when they were still a scrappy, upstart developer—understood something fundamental about human nature: nothing sells quite like controversy. So when they released Grand Theft Auto in 1997, they didn’t just brace for backlash—they manufactured it.
Instead of hoping that conservative media would take the bait and declare their game a menace to society, Rockstar went ahead and baited them on purpose. They reportedly paid PR firms to anonymously tip off right-wing newspapers, urging them to take a closer look at this depraved new video game that let players steal cars, run over pedestrians, and generally cause digital mayhem. And because outrage is the cheapest form of attention, the plan worked flawlessly. Tabloids ran with the story, talk shows clutched their pearls, and self-righteous politicians wagged their fingers—ensuring Grand Theft Auto became the game every teenager suddenly had to play.
Rockstar wasn’t just courting controversy; they were weaponizing it. By nudging the very people most likely to call for a ban, they ensured that GTA wouldn’t just be a game—it would be forbidden fruit. And nothing guarantees sales quite like telling people they shouldn’t be playing something.
The result? A cult hit that spawned a billion-dollar franchise, proving once again that when it comes to pop culture, nothing drives success faster than a well-placed moral panic. If anything, Rockstar’s real crime wasn’t glorifying violence—it was knowing exactly how the media cycle works and playing it better than anyone else.
Javier Bardem’s performance as Anton Chigurh in ‘No Country for Old Men’ was named the ‘Most Realistic Depiction of a Psychopath’ by an independent group of psychologists in the ‘Journal of Forensic Sciences’.
There are movie villains, and then there’s Anton Chigurh—a walking existential nightmare wrapped in a bad haircut and an even worse outlook on humanity. When No Country for Old Men dropped in 2007, audiences knew immediately that Javier Bardem had created something chillingly unique. But it wasn’t just film buffs and Coen Brothers devotees who took notice. An independent group of psychologists, writing in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, actually studied Bardem’s performance and concluded that his portrayal of Anton Chigurh was the most realistic depiction of a psychopath ever put on screen.
Not the Joker. Not Hannibal Lecter. Not any of the usual cinematic lunatics who sneer, monologue, or kill with a theatrical flourish. No, what made Bardem’s Chigurh so terrifying—what made him real—was his sheer lack of emotional investment. He doesn’t kill out of passion, revenge, or sadistic glee. He kills because, in his mind, the coin flip, the arbitrary logic, the cold certainty of fate demands it. That’s what set him apart: his detachment, his unshakable belief that he was merely a vessel for inevitable outcomes, whether you happened to be on the receiving end of a captive bolt pistol or not.
Psychologists pointed out that Hollywood often gets psychopathy wrong—conflating it with rage, impulse, or performative evil. But real psychopaths, the kind who function in society and evade detection, often exhibit the same traits Chigurh does: a lack of empathy, an unshakable confidence in their own twisted logic, and a disturbing sense of calm even in the most extreme situations.
Bardem, for his part, was reportedly deeply unsettled by the role, and no one can blame him. It’s one thing to play a villain—it’s another to embody a level of remorselessness so authentic that actual forensic psychologists cite you as a case study.
Jim Carrey was the first actor to have three films go straight to number one in the same year. The year was 1994, and the films were The Mask, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and Dumb and Dumber.
There are breakout years, and then there’s what Jim Carrey pulled off in 1994—a 12-month stretch so dominant that it didn’t just launch his career, it basically reprogrammed Hollywood’s entire understanding of what a comedic leading man could be. That year, Carrey became the first actor in history to have three films go straight to number one at the box office, and not just any three films—Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber, each an absurd, high-energy spectacle in its own right.
It’s hard to overstate how meteoric this rise was. At the start of ‘94, Carrey was mostly known as that guy from In Living Color, the rubber-faced sketch performer whose physical comedy was almost too manic for television. By the end of the year, he wasn’t just a movie star—he was the movie star, a walking special effect whose entire body seemed built for the kind of comedy that defied physics. He turned a low-budget, critically panned detective spoof (Ace Ventura) into a pop culture phenomenon, transformed a green-faced, Tex Avery-inspired trickster (The Mask) into a box office juggernaut, and then, as if to prove he could do it three times in a row, turned Dumb and Dumber—a movie where he willingly chipped his own tooth for authenticity—into yet another smash hit.
Hollywood had never seen anything like it. In a single year, Carrey went from an unproven wildcard to the biggest comedic force in the industry, a human cartoon who could deliver both surreal slapstick and million-dollar box office returns. And while plenty of actors have had hot streaks, very few have ever had a 1994 Jim Carrey level of ascendance—where one minute you’re a guy with a few sketch show credits, and the next, you’ve completely reshaped the face of comedy for an entire generation.
