For eight years in the middle of the disco era, there was a place in Manhattan where you could grab a plate of barbecued chicken, take a dip in an Olympic sized pool, and watch forty or fifty naked bodies moving together on a mattress the size of a basketball court. That was Plato's Retreat, the heterosexual swingers' club that ran from 1977 to 1985 and became just as famous, in its own way, as its flashier neighbor a few blocks south, Studio 54. Both clubs opened the same ye

Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, a Japanese submarine put two torpedoes into the USS Indianapolis and sank her in twelve minutes. Almost 900 men went into the Pacific Ocean. Nobody came looking for them for nearly four days. By the time rescue planes finally spotted the survivors, sharks, dehydration and salt poisoning had cut their numbers from around 900 down to 316. It remains the single worst loss of life from one ship in the history of the US Navy, and it happened f

You've probably heard the story. Victorian doctors, worn out from manually masturbating female patients to relieve their "hysteria," invented the vibrator to save their poor tired wrists. It's a brilliant story. It's been in bestselling books, a Maggie Gyllenhaal film, and a Broadway play. It's also, as far as historians have been able to establish, almost entirely made up. The real, well-documented history of women's medicine between 1850 and 1950 didn't need a fictional wri