Every past story
Each one is a true moment from history, or a story the world still tells, stopped at the point where someone had to choose. Newest first.
- The Essay in the Drawer4 Oct 2026c. 1785 · Jeremy Bentham, who has finished an essay arguing that sex between men should not be a crime
- The Block and the Knife3 Oct 202626 December 1502 · Machiavelli, Florence's envoy, sent to report on Cesare Borgia's conduct
- Twice Against Philosophy2 Oct 2026323 BC · Aristotle, Alexander's old tutor, charged with impiety as Athens turns on all things Macedonian
- In Her Own Name1 Oct 2026690 · Wu Zetian, China's power behind the throne for decades, as the court urges her to take it herself
- The Paper They Want Signed30 Sep 2026May 1431 · Joan of Arc, nineteen, after months on trial in English-held Rouen
- The Sleigh West29 Sep 2026December 1812 · Napoleon, retreating from his invasion of Russia with what is left of his army
- Into the Tent28 Sep 2026Homer's Iliad · Priam, king of Troy, twelve days after Achilles killed his son Hector
- What the Drains Did27 Sep 20261855–58 · Florence Nightingale, preparing a report meant to reform British army medicine
- The Door to the Allies26 Sep 20261814 · Talleyrand, Napoleon's former foreign minister, as the allied armies close on Paris
- A Way Out of the Room25 Sep 2026February 1943 · Sophie Scholl, 21, under Gestapo interrogation after her arrest with her brother
- The Murderer at the Door24 Sep 20261797 · Kant, 73, as a young French writer attacks his ethics with a murderer at the door
- A Handful of Dust23 Sep 2026Sophocles' Antigone · Antigone, after her brothers killed each other and Creon honored only one
- The Best Available Man22 Sep 2026c. 175 · Marcus Aurelius, the first emperor in eighty years with a living son of his own
- Twenty-Two Policemen21 Sep 2026February 1922 · Gandhi, leading the Non-Cooperation Movement he launched in 1920
- Six of Them20 Sep 2026Homer's Odyssey · Odysseus, sailing home with his last ship, warned by Circe of the strait ahead
- An Anointed Queen19 Sep 20261586 · Elizabeth I, after intercepted letters tied her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, to a plot to kill her
- The Fourth Cable18 Sep 2026July 1940 · Chiune Sugihara, Japan's vice-consul in Kaunas, with Polish-Jewish refugees at his gate
- The Father's Sheep17 Sep 20265th century BC, Chu · A son whose father has taken a neighbor's sheep, from a case in the Analects
- The Foot of the Alps16 Sep 202672 BC · Spartacus, the escaped gladiator, after beating the Roman force blocking his road to the Alps
- No One Turns Back15 Sep 2026c. 1856 · Harriet Tubman, leading a group north, with dogs heard behind them earlier that night
- The Chancellor's Red Pen14 Sep 20261870 · Bismarck, as France presses Prussia for a guarantee over Spain's vacant throne
- The Gates of New Carthage13 Sep 2026209 BC · Scipio, Rome's young commander in Spain, at the siege of New Carthage