Picture this: it’s the middle of winter in New Zealand. You’re rugged up on the couch in your best black hoodie, doom-scrolling TikTok while the rain hammers the windows. And there, between a satisfying slime video and a Tauranga café review, an absolute unit of a medieval torture device appears on your screen. Welcome, my ghoulishly curious friends, to the very strange second life of the thumbscrew or as history’s more dramatic corners prefer to call it, the Devil’s Handshake.

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