Imrul Hasan, Author at Revlox

The Encyclopedic Novel: Literature’s Most Ambitious and Impossible Form

19Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

literature

The Encyclopedic Novel: Literature’s Most Ambitious and Impossible Form

Few terms in literary studies carry as much weight, mystery, and intellectual ambition as the phrase “encyclopedic novel.” It is a genre that does not merely tell a story — it attempts to contain worlds. A form so vast and intricate that it tries, in one sweeping narrative, to capture the full range of human knowledge, history, science, culture, psychology, philosophy, technology, and myth. To read one is to step inside a gigantic organism. To write one is to wrestle with the very limits of language. The encyclopedic novel is not just a long book. It is a totalizing work — a novel that behaves like an archive, a philosophical treatise, a scientific manual, a poetic text, and a historical document all at once. Its ambition is not just to entertain but to encompass. To gather the pieces of ...

Humans and Dinosaurs: Could They Ever Have Coexisted, or Is It a Story We Want to Believe?

19Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Mystery, World

Humans and Dinosaurs: Could They Ever Have Coexisted, or Is It a Story We Want to Believe?

Few ideas grip the human imagination as tightly as the possibility that humans and dinosaurs once walked the Earth together. It appears everywhere—ancient carvings, religious interpretations, viral documentaries, fringe archaeology, and even childhood fantasies of spears facing towering reptiles. The image feels powerful, almost instinctive: humanity standing eye-to-eye with creatures that symbolize raw, prehistoric dominance. Yet mainstream science insists this never happened. According to the established timeline, dinosaurs went extinct roughly 66 million years ago, while anatomically modern humans appeared around 300,000 years ago. Between them stretches a gulf so vast it dwarfs recorded history. And still, the question refuses to die. Why does the idea persist? Is it pure myth, misi...

The Fourth Turning: Why History Repeats in Cycles—and Why the Next Crisis Was Never a Surprise

19Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Books, World

The Fourth Turning: Why History Repeats in Cycles—and Why the Next Crisis Was Never a Surprise

History does not move forward in a straight line. It breathes. It contracts and expands. It builds, stabilizes, decays, and then violently renews itself. This unsettling idea sits at the heart of The Fourth Turning, the influential and controversial book by William Strauss and Neil Howe that argues modern history follows a recurring generational cycle—one that inevitably ends in crisis. According to the authors, societies do not simply progress. They rotate through predictable phases driven by generational psychology. Roughly every 80 to 100 years—about the length of a long human life—civilizations enter a period of upheaval so profound that it reshapes institutions, values, power structures, and collective identity. These periods are not accidents. They are structural resets. And if Str...

“Breakfast Is the Most Important Meal of the Day”: Science, Psychology, and the Marketing Myth That Shaped How the World Eats

19Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Culture, Lifestyle

“Breakfast Is the Most Important Meal of the Day”: Science, Psychology, and the Marketing Myth That Shaped How the World Eats

For more than a century, one sentence has quietly governed mornings across the globe: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It appears in school textbooks, health campaigns, cereal commercials, hospital pamphlets, and parental advice passed down like unquestioned wisdom. Skip breakfast and you’re told your metabolism will slow, your brain will fog, your weight will spiral, and your productivity will collapse. But here’s the uncomfortable truth modern science keeps circling back to: that statement did not come from nutrition science. It came from marketing. That does not mean breakfast is useless. It means the certainty surrounding it was manufactured long before evidence arrived. And once an idea embeds itself into culture, it becomes very difficult to separate habit from fact...

The Nuclear Device Lost in the Himalayas: A Cold War Secret Still Buried Above the Ganga

17Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

History, World

The Nuclear Device Lost in the Himalayas: A Cold War Secret Still Buried Above the Ganga

High in the Indian Himalayas, where rock gives way to ice and human presence thins into myth, a Cold War secret may still lie entombed beneath glaciers. It is not a legend from antiquity or a rumor born of folklore. It is a documented operation involving the CIA, India’s Intelligence Bureau, and a nuclear-powered surveillance device that vanished in 1965 on the slopes of Nanda Devi, India’s second-highest mountain. More than sixty years later, no one knows exactly where it went. And as glaciers retreat under accelerating climate change, the question that once belonged to geopolitics is quietly becoming an environmental one: what happens if a nuclear-powered device resurfaces above one of the world’s most sacred river systems? To understand why this story still matters, one must step bac...

“The Conqueror” (1956): How One Hollywood Film Became a Silent Tragedy of Radiation, Denial, and Deadly Consequences

17Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Crime, History, Hollywood, Movies, Weird World

“The Conqueror” (1956): How One Hollywood Film Became a Silent Tragedy of Radiation, Denial, and Deadly Consequences

In 1956, Hollywood released The Conqueror, a lavish historical epic starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan. On the surface, it was just another mid-century studio production—expensive sets, sweeping desert landscapes, and the confident belief that spectacle alone could carry a film to success. What no one acknowledged publicly at the time, and what would take decades to fully understand, was that The Conqueror would become one of the darkest cautionary tales in film history. Not because of its artistic failure, but because of what it did to the people who made it. Over the following decades, an unusually high number of cast and crew members developed cancer. Many died young. The pattern was so striking that it could not be dismissed as coincidence. At the center of the controversy was a grim...

RTLM and Rwanda: How a Radio Station Helped Kill a Nation While the World Listened and Did Nothing

16Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Crime, History

RTLM and Rwanda: How a Radio Station Helped Kill a Nation While the World Listened and Did Nothing

In 1994, nearly 800,000 people were murdered in Rwanda in just about one hundred days. Most were Tutsi. Many were moderate Hutu. They were hacked to death with machetes, beaten with clubs, shot, burned, hunted in churches and schools where they believed they were safe. It was one of the fastest, most efficient genocides in human history. And much of it was organized, directed, and energized not by secret military orders or shadowy conspiracies—but by a radio station. Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, known as RTLM, did not simply report the genocide. It helped create it. To understand Rwanda in 1994, you must understand RTLM. And to understand RTLM, you must confront one of the most damning truths of modern history: the genocide was not inevitable, and the world did not fail be...

When the Body Turns Off Pain: The Hidden Survival Mechanism That Makes Humans Extraordinary

14Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Health

When the Body Turns Off Pain: The Hidden Survival Mechanism That Makes Humans Extraordinary

Pain is one of the most fundamental human sensations. It protects us, warns us, slows us down, and signals when something in the body has gone wrong. And yet, under certain circumstances, the human body can do something astonishing—something that seems almost supernatural: it can shut pain off completely. Not reduce it. Not dull it. Completely override it. This isn’t magic. It isn’t adrenaline bravado. It isn’t denial, delusion, or emotional distraction. It is biology. It is evolution. It is the brilliance of the human brain stepping in during life-threatening moments, making a split-second decision that survival matters more than sensation. This phenomenon—often called stress-induced analgesia or “pain immunity”—is one of the clearest examples of how the human organism prioritizes life a...

Bhutan: The Quiet Revolution of a Carbon-Negative Kingdom

14Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Nature, World

Bhutan: The Quiet Revolution of a Carbon-Negative Kingdom

In a world obsessed with growth charts, GDP rankings, and relentless consumption, Bhutan feels almost unreal. Tucked between the towering Himalayas, this small, landlocked nation has achieved something the rest of the world still treats as a distant aspiration: it absorbs more carbon dioxide than it emits. While global summits debate emission targets decades into the future, Bhutan already lives in that future. It is, quite literally, the world’s only carbon-negative country — and it achieved this not through technological obsession or economic dominance, but through philosophy, restraint, and an unusually deep respect for nature. Bhutan’s carbon-negative status is not a marketing slogan or a temporary statistical anomaly. It is the result of decades of deliberate choices rooted in cultur...

Sydney Sweeney, Truth, and the Modern Obsession With Women’s Bodies: Why One Lie Detector Moment Says More Than It Seems

14Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Beauty, Humor

Sydney Sweeney, Truth, and the Modern Obsession With Women’s Bodies: Why One Lie Detector Moment Says More Than It Seems

In the age of constant visibility, where every frame of a woman’s body can be zoomed, slowed, compared, and dissected by millions of strangers, it takes very little for a casual moment to turn into a cultural event. That is exactly what happened when Sydney Sweeney, the 28-year-old actress whose rise has been swift, scrutinized, and endlessly discussed, sat down next to her The Housemaid co-star Amanda Seyfried for Vanity Fair’s iconic lie detector series. What began as playful banter between two accomplished actresses quickly evolved into something far more revealing—not about anatomy, but about the pressure placed on women who exist in the public eye. The video, published on December 11, was designed to be bold. Vanity Fair’s lie detector format thrives on the promise that nothing is of...

The Ariel School UFO Incident: The Day 62 Children in Zimbabwe Told the Same Impossible Story

14Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Mystery

The Ariel School UFO Incident: The Day 62 Children in Zimbabwe Told the Same Impossible Story

On the morning of September 16, 1994, something extraordinary happened in a quiet suburb outside Harare, Zimbabwe. It did not involve radar failures, military jets, or classified government documents. There were no scientists in lab coats, no politicians at podiums, no dramatic press conferences. Instead, the witnesses were children — dozens of them — playing on a schoolyard during morning recess. And what they reported seeing that day would become one of the most disturbing, debated, and enduring UFO cases in modern history. At Ariel School in Ruwa, a private primary school serving mostly middle-class families, 62 children independently described encountering a strange craft and non-human beings. Their accounts were recorded immediately, repeatedly, and over time. They were interviewed b...

Roman Self-Healing Concrete: The Ancient “Liquid Stone” That Modern Science Still Can’t Fully Replicate

14Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

History

Roman Self-Healing Concrete: The Ancient “Liquid Stone” That Modern Science Still Can’t Fully Replicate

Two thousand years ago, Roman engineers created something that modern civilization is still struggling to match. Not a monument, not a road, not an aqueduct—but a material. A form of concrete so durable that it has survived earthquakes, floods, saltwater corrosion, and the slow violence of time itself. While modern concrete crumbles within decades, Roman concrete structures still stand, often stronger today than when they were first built. And most astonishing of all, this ancient material appears to heal itself. For centuries, the secret of Roman concrete was treated as a historical curiosity. Scholars admired it. Engineers puzzled over it. But it wasn’t until the 21st century that scientists finally began to understand what the Romans had accidentally—or intuitively—created: a self-repa...

Air Layering Farming: The Ancient Plant-Propagation Technique That Still Outperforms Modern Methods

14Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Agriculture

Air Layering Farming: The Ancient Plant-Propagation Technique That Still Outperforms Modern Methods

In an age of hybrid seeds, tissue culture, genetic modification, and industrial-scale agriculture, it is easy to assume that ancient farming techniques have been rendered obsolete. Yet some of the most effective methods in horticulture today are not innovations at all, but rediscoveries. Among them is air layering—a deceptively simple, remarkably reliable propagation technique that has been used for centuries across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and is now quietly regaining popularity among modern farmers, gardeners, and orchardists. Air layering is not flashy. It does not require laboratories, expensive equipment, or advanced chemistry. What it requires instead is patience, observation, and a deep understanding of how plants naturally heal and reproduce. And when done correctly, it ...

Horsehair Worms: The Real-Life Body Snatchers Hiding in Plain Sight

14Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Others

Horsehair Worms: The Real-Life Body Snatchers Hiding in Plain Sight

Few creatures provoke as much unease as horsehair worms. Long, thin, and eerily alive, they appear suddenly in puddles, toilets, water troughs, or damp soil—often writhing as if animated by something unnatural. For centuries, people believed these worms were born from horse manes left soaking in water, a superstition so widespread that it gave the creatures their common name. Today, science has revealed something far stranger than folklore ever imagined. Horsehair worms are real, ancient parasites with one of the most disturbing life cycles in the animal kingdom, capable of manipulating their hosts’ behavior in ways that feel uncomfortably close to science fiction. Despite their appearance and reputation, horsehair worms are not monsters. They are members of a group called Nematomorpha, c...

Amy Lee at 44: The Voice That Turned Pain Into Power and Redefined Modern Rock

14Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Music, Personalities

Amy Lee at 44: The Voice That Turned Pain Into Power and Redefined Modern Rock

On her 44th birthday, Amy Lee stands as one of the most singular figures in modern rock history—not because she chased reinvention, trends, or controversy, but because she stayed rooted in something far rarer: emotional truth. As the co-founder, lead vocalist, principal songwriter, and keyboardist of Evanescence, Lee did more than front a successful band. She carved out a space where vulnerability, classical discipline, and heavy music could coexist without compromise. Her career is often summarized through milestones—chart-topping albums, iconic songs, collaborations with major artists—but those markers only hint at the deeper story. Amy Lee’s real legacy lies in how she changed the emotional language of rock music, giving grief, introspection, and inner conflict a sound that millions re...

Arturo the Polar Bear: What One Life in Captivity Revealed About Animal Suffering, Silence, and Responsibility

13Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Nature, Pets & Animals

Arturo the Polar Bear: What One Life in Captivity Revealed About Animal Suffering, Silence, and Responsibility

Arturo’s life was never meant to unfold under concrete skies. He was born a polar bear, an animal shaped by ice, distance, and silence—built for vast white landscapes, freezing winds, and a life governed by instinctual rhythms older than humanity itself. Instead, Arturo spent decades confined in a zoo in Mendoza, Argentina, thousands of miles from the Arctic, enduring extreme heat, isolation, and an environment fundamentally incompatible with his biology. His story is not just about one animal. It is a mirror held up to how modern society defines care, captivity, and compassion. For years, Arturo lived in a small enclosure at the Mendoza Zoo, where summer temperatures frequently exceeded 40°C (104°F). Polar bears are evolutionarily adapted to survive some of the coldest environments on Ea...

The 10-Second Habit That Could Change Your Health: Why Scientists Say Humming Might Be One of the Most Powerful Breathing Tools You’re Not Using

11Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Health, Lifestyle

The 10-Second Habit That Could Change Your Health: Why Scientists Say Humming Might Be One of the Most Powerful Breathing Tools You’re Not Using

In an age where wellness trends rise and fall faster than we can keep track, it’s almost impossible to separate science-backed techniques from fleeting fads. Breathwork has exploded into mainstream culture—cold plunges, Wim Hof breathing, yogic pranayama, CO₂ tolerance training, and countless “biohacks” have dominated social feeds. But long before the world turned its attention to performance breathing, a simple human reflex existed quietly in the background, overlooked, underappreciated, and scientifically underestimated. That reflex is humming. A sound so casual, so effortless, so woven into everyday life that most people give it no thought. We hum when we’re happy, absentminded, nervous, or lost in thought. We hum in the shower, while cooking, while walking, while calming ourselves. B...

Airport Divorce: Why Modern Couples Are Breaking Up Before Takeoff

11Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Relationships

Airport Divorce: Why Modern Couples Are Breaking Up Before Takeoff

t used to be that airports symbolized excitement — honeymoons, reunions, bucket-list adventures, and that romantic movie moment where two people run toward each other across the arrivals lounge. But in the last few years, airports have acquired a strangely dark reputation. They’ve become the unlikely stage for one of the most painful social trends emerging from modern relationships: the Airport Divorce. If you’ve spent time scrolling through TikTok, Instagram Reels, or Reddit threads, you’ve probably stumbled upon couples who don’t make it past security, who break up at the gate, or who end entire relationships somewhere between baggage drop and boarding. The trend isn’t literal divorce filings inside terminals — rather, it’s a cultural shorthand for relationships collapsing right before ...

The Last Day: A Cinematic Retelling of John Lennon’s Final Hours

9Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Music

The Last Day: A Cinematic Retelling of John Lennon’s Final Hours

Morning breaks over Manhattan with a pale, wintery glow. December 8, 1980. A Monday. The kind of day that feels ordinary, even comforting, as if the city itself is taking a soft breath before the rush. Inside The Dakota, the iconic Gothic building overlooking Central Park, John Lennon wakes slowly beside Yoko Ono. He does not know this will be the last sunrise he ever sees. He stretches, yawns lightly, rubs the sleep from his eyes. His hair is tousled, his voice still gravelly from rest. He is forty years old, a husband, a father, a musician rediscovering his creative fire after five years of quiet domestic living. He feels content — full in a way he hasn’t felt in years. Sean has breakfast with them. John kisses his son’s forehead. He calls him “Beautiful Boy,” just as he did in the lull...

9Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Music

The Inner Revolutions of John Lennon: A Deep Psychological Profile of His Artistic Evolution

John Lennon did not merely create music; he created worlds. His artistic evolution was not a straight line but a map of inner battles, emotional awakenings, personal reinventions, and psychological transformations that unfolded over four tumultuous decades. What made Lennon extraordinary was not just his lyrical brilliance or melodic instinct, but his willingness to expose his mind—raw, wounded, defiant, searching—in ways few artists ever dare. His evolution was not driven solely by talent. It was shaped by trauma, rebellion, love, fear, loss, spiritual yearning, and a restless desire to understand himself. Lennon’s journey from working-class Liverpool boy to global icon, from troubled youth to countercultural revolutionary, from angry cynic to idealistic dreamer, reflects a psychological ...