A sphere can be turned inside out in three-dimensional space without cutting, tearing or creasing it, as long as the surface is allowed to pass through itself during the process. Mathematicians call this sphere eversion, and it is possible because the surface can be moved smoothly from one shape to its mirror version through a continuous family of immersions. The result is surprising because intuition suggests a sphere's inside and outside cannot be swapped without a crease. It was proven by Stephen Smale in 1957 using ideas from regular homotopy, and later explicit constructions were found. It is a veridical paradox: true, but it seems false at first glance.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.