When Carrie Fisher told Harrison Ford she was going to publish her journals & reveal they had an affair (Ford was married) while filming Star Wars (1977), Ford raised his finger & said “Lawyer!”
In 1977, Harrison Ford had two kids, a wife, and a carpenter’s tan. Carrie Fisher was 19, famously brilliant, possibly stoned, and about to be devoured by the black hole of global pop culture fandom. They met on the set of Star Wars, a film that would make them both immortal, though not necessarily in the same way. He would become an icon; she would become Princess Leia. Not the actress who played her. Leia. Period.
They had an affair. You know this now. It was secret then. She was smitten. He was stoic. You can already picture it like a TikTok slideshow: her sitting on a trailer step, writing in a diary; him leaning against a wall, arms crossed, looking like a Marlboro Man who crash-landed on Tatooine.
But this isn’t about the affair. This is about the aftermath.
Decades later—after the cocaine, the breakdowns, the comeback, the legacy rebrand—Fisher found the journals. Not metaphorical ones. Literal spiral notebooks filled with her teenage thoughts while filming Star Wars. And like any person who’s lived long enough to develop both self-awareness and a book deal, she decided to publish them.
Out of respect (or guilt, or habit), she told Ford.
“I found the journals,” she said, “and I’m probably going to publish them.”
He raised a finger. Not a middle one, though that might have been more honest. Just a single index finger. And said, “Lawyer.”
Now: that’s a fascinating response. “Lawyer.” One word, two syllables, infinite implications. It’s not “Don’t.” It’s not “Please.” It’s not even “Let’s talk about this.” It’s a corporate firewall wrapped in denim. It’s not a conversation ender—it’s a conversation detonator. And yet, somehow, it’s also him staying completely in character. Not as Harrison Ford, the man, but as Harrison Ford, the myth. The guy who never fully explained anything, who somehow became sexier the less he spoke. You can’t argue with “Lawyer.” You can only interpret it.
Fisher, being Fisher, said she’d let him read it first. That he could take anything out. That she didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, although she probably already had. So she sent him the manuscript.
He never responded. Not a word. Not a note. Not even a redacted Post-it stuck to a page saying “Too much.”
And here’s where things get weird, or at least philosophically interesting: Did that silence mean anything? Was it passive approval? Subtle punishment? A power move? A shrug in the shape of a ghost? Or was it just… nothing?
Because what if that’s the point? What if Harrison Ford not replying is the most Harrison Ford reply?
Fisher published the book anyway—The Princess Diarist—and it was raw, sharp, and unsettling. Not because it exposed Ford as a villain (it didn’t), but because it exposed Fisher as someone who wanted to be seen by someone who had no interest in looking. She wasn’t bitter. She was honest. Painfully so. The book reads like someone excavating their own mythology with a spoon.
There’s something beautifully tragic about it. He gave her his silence. She gave him a page number. He stayed cool. She stayed human.
And maybe that’s what always separated them. He got to be iconic. She had to be real.
Which is exactly why she had to publish it.
And why he never had to say a damn thing.
Of the 340+ people who’ve died attempting to scale Mount Everest, over 200 bodies haven’t been found or recovered due to the hazardous conditions
The air near the summit of Mount Everest is so thin, so punishingly devoid of oxygen, that the human body begins to die the moment it enters what climbers grimly call the death zone. Above 26,000 feet, each breath draws in only a third of the oxygen found at sea level. Cognition dulls. Muscles fail. Decisions that would be routine at base camp become catastrophic.
It’s here—among the serrated ridgelines and howling winds—that more than 340 people have perished since attempts to conquer the mountain began. And of those, over 200 bodies remain where they fell.
They are not buried. They are not airlifted out. They are still there.
Some sit in repose, frozen in place, as if merely resting. Others lie twisted where they collapsed, boots poking from snowdrifts, down suits bleached by decades of sun and ice. A few have become grim landmarks, nicknamed by climbers as waypoints: “Green Boots,” “Sleeping Beauty.” Their presence is so common, so permanent, that the trail to the top winds past them like old cairns.
Why aren’t they retrieved? Because to do so is nearly impossible. Helicopters can’t fly that high with reliability. Carrying even a backpack at that altitude can be a herculean effort; dragging 150 pounds of frozen dead weight down a vertical face is a feat beyond most mortals. Rescue missions have themselves ended in death. So the mountain keeps what it takes.
For some, the presence of the bodies is a sobering reminder of the risks. For others, they’re an accepted part of the price paid to touch the top of the world. In the thin air near Everest’s summit, death is not a stranger. It is a companion.
And it waits.
Joseph D. Pistone, who worked undercover as Donnie Brasco to infiltrate the Mafia, received a $500 bonus from his employers at the end of the operation
Joe Pistone didn’t just go undercover. He disappeared.
When the FBI asked him to infiltrate the Mafia in the late 1970s, they weren’t talking about wearing a wire for a week or chatting up low-level guys at a bar. This wasn’t a quick bust. This was full immersion—no badge, no backup, no turning back. Pistone became Donnie Brasco, a low-key jewel thief with a Brooklyn accent, a quiet demeanor, and just enough street knowledge to pass.
For six years, he walked among some of the most violent men in New York without flinching. He sat at the tables. Went to the weddings. Ate the pasta. Listened, always listened. And never once slipped. Not a wrong word, not a wrong gesture. Because in that life, a mistake isn’t corrected. It’s buried.
He got close—too close. In the Bonanno family, he rose through the ranks. He ran errands. Helped with collections. Did favors. Earned. He was being groomed for formal induction. A made man. An FBI agent on the verge of becoming the very thing he was trying to destroy. No one had ever gotten that far before. No one’s come that close since.
And this wasn’t just any crew. He was under Lefty Ruggiero, a tough old-school soldier who’d been around long enough to see the old bosses fall and the young ones die stupid. Lefty wasn’t a fool. But he trusted Donnie. That trust, that bond, was what made the whole thing work. And it’s what made it hurt.
Because when the Bureau finally pulled Pistone out, they had to let the operation implode. The arrests came fast. The charges stuck. But inside the life, the fallout was personal. Ruggiero had vouched for him. He nearly died for it.
Pistone didn’t just bring down a crew—he tore at the fabric of the thing. The Mafia was built on the idea that they could smell a rat from a mile away. That you just knew. But they didn’t know. They had no idea. And it shook them. Made them paranoid. Sloppy. Weak. That’s the real legacy of Donnie Brasco. He didn’t just help make cases—he helped change the game.
But you don’t come back from something like that unchanged. Pistone lost years. Lost his name. His kids couldn’t know where he was. His wife was married to a ghost. And when it was over, when the tapes were logged and the trials began, he didn’t get a parade.
He got a $500 bonus.
That part’s almost funny, if it weren’t so absurd. But that’s not the story. The story is that Joe Pistone lived a lie for six years and never once slipped. He played the part so well, he almost stopped playing.
And when it was over, there wasn’t a headline big enough to explain what he’d done. Just a name—Donnie Brasco—that the mob still spits out like a curse.
The X-Files episode “Home” was so twisted, dark, and disturbing that it only aired on Fox once, was banned from re-runs on the network, and disappeared until the show re-aired on cable channel FX.
There’s an episode of The X-Files—season 4, episode 2, to be precise—called “Home.” And if you’ve seen it, you remember it. Not in that vague, “I think I watched it when I was sick in eighth grade” kind of way. No. You remember it like the way you remember walking in on your parents fighting with words so sharp you thought someone might die. You remember it in that I didn’t know network television could even do that sort of way. It’s the TV equivalent of hearing a nursery rhyme recited by Charles Manson.
“Home” aired one time on Fox. One time. That’s it. Just once. And then it got yanked into the void like it was cursed media, like it was part of that urban legend about the haunted VHS that kills you in seven days. It didn’t just disappear—it was banished. No reruns, no syndication, no comforting re-airing on a random Thursday night. The thing was too gnarly even for the era of Cops and Married… with Children, which is saying something, because that was a time when edgy didn’t mean “emotional honesty” or “an unflinching look at the nuances of grief.” It meant someone probably got decapitated and someone else probably said something racist.
This was a time when Fox was trying to convince America that it was the cool kid in the media cafeteria. It had The Simpsons, it had Melrose Place, it had that weird sci-fi vibe that made you think being a loner with a conspiracy theory wasn’t a red flag—it was sexy. But “Home” crossed the line. And that line, it turns out, is drawn in blood, incest, and a quadriplegic woman under a bed.
If you’ve never seen “Home,” here’s the gist: it opens with a deformed baby being buried alive in a rainstorm outside a crumbling farmhouse in the middle of Pennsylvania. This isn’t a metaphor. That’s literally how it begins. And somehow, it gets worse. The villains of the episode—if you can even call them that, since they’re more like grotesque portraits of inbred Americana—are the Peacock family, who are basically what would happen if Norman Rockwell painted a still life after losing a bet to David Lynch.
It’s rural horror distilled into something that feels personal. It’s not a monster-of-the-week. It’s not an alien or a cryptid or a possessed doll. It’s us. Or at least the part of “us” that we pretend doesn’t exist—the part we paved over with Target parking lots and brunch menus. “Home” is the smell of something rotting behind the drywall of your suburban safety net. It’s not just scary—it’s offensive to your entire worldview.
And yet… it’s brilliant. Like, artistically. Morally, it’s probably a war crime. But narratively, it’s a masterclass in tension, pacing, and exactly how far you can push an audience before they start questioning their decision to ever own a television.
Eventually, the episode found its way back onto the airwaves through the slightly more nihilistic embrace of FX, because cable channels didn’t care if your parents were uncomfortable. Cable wanted your parents to be uncomfortable. That was kind of the point.
But maybe that’s what makes “Home” legendary. Not because it was terrifying (though it absolutely was). Not because it was violent (though again, check). But because it was too real in a way that TV doesn’t usually allow. It wasn’t about aliens. It wasn’t about ghosts. It was about what happens when you leave a family alone long enough that their morality collapses in on itself like a dying star.
“Home” is the episode that whispered, What if the scariest thing in the world isn’t the unknown? What if it’s the forgotten? And then it vanished. Because sometimes, the scariest stories are the ones you’re not allowed to tell more than once.
In the middle ages suicidal people feared eternal damnation that direct suicide entailed, so they would commit a capital crime over innocent child and then turn themselves in to authorities and demand capital punishment
It’s easy—too easy—to look back on the Middle Ages and scoff. To flatten an entire era into a caricature: plagues, superstition, and people who thought bathing was dangerous. But if you scratch past the surface—if you really spend time with the records, the court cases, the sermons, the ecclesiastical rulings—you’ll start to see something far more disturbing. You’ll see people making decisions that feel alien, and yet horrifyingly logical when viewed from the confines of their world.
And this is where we encounter one of the most haunting practices I’ve ever come across. A phenomenon so chilling, so morally impossible, that even the medieval chroniclers sometimes seemed unsure how to write about it: the act of committing murder—sometimes of a child, sometimes a stranger, often someone entirely innocent—not out of cruelty, or even anger, but out of despair. Despair weaponized by doctrine.
Here’s what happened. In the Middle Ages, suicide wasn’t just a sin—it was a spiritual death sentence. Eternal damnation. No absolution. No last rites. No purgatory. You were out. Your body might be desecrated. Your name blackened. Your soul irrevocably lost.
But what if you wanted to die? What if your life had become unbearable and you craved oblivion—but your theology wouldn’t let you take the “easy” way out?
Some found a solution so twisted it defies belief: they would commit a capital crime. On purpose. Knowing they would be executed. But—and this is the horrifying twist—they would also ensure they confessed, expressed remorse, and sought absolution before they died. In their minds, this was a loophole. You couldn’t kill yourself, but if the state did it, and you repented just in time… maybe you could sneak into heaven through the back door.
This is not hypothetical. We have documentation. Court records. Confessions. Cases where desperate individuals—overwhelmed by mental illness, poverty, or unspeakable grief—would attack children or other vulnerable people, not out of hatred but out of strategy. They would walk to the town square, commit the act in public, and then calmly turn themselves in. Some would even beg the authorities to execute them quickly, lest they lose their chance at redemption.
Try to imagine the psychological calculus involved in that decision. Try to imagine how the machinery of belief—the very thing that was supposed to bring hope and stability—had created a moral maze with a murder-shaped exit sign.
And now ask yourself the hard question: is this madness? Or is it an extreme form of logic operating within an unforgiving system?
The problem wasn’t that these people were evil. The problem was that they were trapped—trapped in a theological architecture that offered no mercy for self-inflicted suffering, but left open a loophole wide enough to drive a dagger through someone else’s chest.
This is the kind of story that forces us to confront just how much worldview dictates morality. We may recoil in horror, and we should. But if we’d been born then—into that structure, that fear, that cosmology—how confident are we that we’d see things differently?
Because history doesn’t just show us who we were. It shows us what we’re capable of becoming when the stakes are eternal.
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