Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
The Ramayana is one of the longest poems in any language, roughly twenty-four thousand verses in its oldest form, and it tells a story that hundreds of millions of people know by heart: a prince is ex...
Read article →Rabbi Nachman of Breslov died in 1810, at thirty-eight, of tuberculosis, having spent the last decade of his life telling stories that no rabbi had ever told before. They were fairy tales. They featur...
Read article →Marvin Gaye grew up in a house where church was mandatory and violence was routine. His father, Marvin Gay Sr., was a minister in the House of God, a Pentecostal sect that blended strict religious obs...
Read article →In 1887, a twenty-three-year-old reporter named Elizabeth Cochrane faked insanity to get committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York. She spent ten days inside, documenti...
Read article →Pauline Bonaparte posed nude for the sculptor Antonio Canova in 1805, and when asked how she could have endured the experience, she replied that the room had been heated. This was not embarrassment ma...
Read article →In 1079, the Seljuk Sultan Jalal al-Din Malik-Shah asked a group of astronomers to reform the Persian calendar. The astronomer who led the project was a mathematician from Nishapur named Omar Khayyam,...
Read article →The most famous story about Rabbi Akiva is the one where he cannot read. He is forty years old, an illiterate shepherd working for a wealthy man named Kalba Savua in first-century Judea. Kalba Savua's...
Read article →Anthony Paul Moo-Young grew up in Jamaica, moved to London as a teenager, worked as a street artist in Brixton, and spent years painting portraits of passersby before a single encounter with a Christi...
Read article →In the eighth century, the Tibetan King Trisong Detsen decided to build a monastery. The project kept failing. Local spirits, the Tibetans believed, were sabotaging the construction. Walls fell. Worke...
Read article →Daniel Dumile first appeared on stage wearing a metal mask in 1999, performing at open mic nights in New York under the name MF DOOM. Nobody knew who he was, which was precisely the idea. He had been...
Read article →On December 14, 1911, Roald Amundsen and four companions reached the South Pole, becoming the first human beings to stand at the bottom of the world. They planted a Norwegian flag, took measurements t...
Read article →Mary Oliver walked. That was the central fact of her creative life. She walked through the woods and marshes near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, every morning, carrying a notebook and a penc...
Read article →On the Big Island of Hawaii, when lava flows from Kilauea toward the sea, some residents do not evacuate. They watch. They leave offerings of gin, tobacco, and ohelo berries at the edge of the flow. T...
Read article →Otis Redding was twenty-six years old in December 1967. He had spent the last five years building himself into one of the most electrifying performers in American music, a man who sang with such physi...
Read article →Anne de l'Enclos, known to Paris as Ninon, was born in 1620 and died in 1705, having spent eighty-five years demonstrating that a woman could live on her own terms in a society designed to prevent exa...
Read article →Mary Kingsley spent the first thirty years of her life trapped in a Victorian house in London, nursing her invalid mother and waiting for her traveling father to come home with stories. She had no for...
Read article →Before Martha Graham, dancers pointed their toes, arched their backs, and moved as though gravity were merely a suggestion. Ballet was the dominant form, and ballet demanded that the body deny its own...
Read article →In the late eighteenth century, a Zen monk named Ryokan lived alone in a small hut on Mount Kugami in Niigata Prefecture, Japan. The hut leaked when it rained. He owned almost nothing. He begged for h...
Read article →In 1499, a man named Nanak walked into the Kali Bein river near Sultanpur Lodhi in Punjab. He did not come out for three days. When he emerged, the first thing he said was there is no Hindu and there...
Read article →The Fifth Patriarch of Chan Buddhism held a poetry contest to choose his successor. The senior monk, Shenxiu, wrote a verse comparing the mind to a bright mirror that must be constantly polished to ke...
Read article →On February 17, 1600, in the Campo de' Fiori in Rome, a former Dominican friar was stripped naked, gagged with a metal spike through his tongue so he could not speak, and burned at the stake. His name...
Read article →In 1325, a twenty-one-year-old law student from Tangier left home to make the hajj to Mecca. He did not come back for twenty-nine years. By the time he returned, he had traveled approximately seventy-...
Read article →Lenny Bruce was arrested for obscenity more times than any performer in American history. His crime was saying words onstage. Not threatening words. Not incitement. Just words that the state of New Yo...
Read article →Karen Armstrong spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun. She entered the convent at seventeen, full of faith. She left at twenty-four, empty of it. The years between were, by her own account, a sust...
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