Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Hermes Trismegistus, the Thrice-Great, is the author of the Hermetic texts. Except he probably did not exist. The writings attributed to him were composed by multiple anonymous authors in Alexandria b...
Read article →Lady Macbeth has eleven scenes in Shakespeare's play. She dominates every one of them. She is onstage for approximately one hundred and fifty lines, which is less than many minor characters in other p...
Read article →Josephine Baker arrived in Paris in 1925, danced on stage wearing a skirt made of artificial bananas, and became the most famous entertainer in France overnight. She was nineteen. She was from St. Lou...
Read article →Joan of Arc was a peasant girl from Domremy who said that saints spoke to her and told her to save France. She was thirteen when the voices started. She was seventeen when she convinced the French cou...
Read article →Charlotte Bronte published Jane Eyre in 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell. The book was an immediate sensation. Readers could not stop talking about the heroine: a small, plain, penniless governess...
Read article →Hatshepsut became pharaoh of Egypt by doing something no woman had done in over a thousand years: she simply declared herself king. Not queen regent. Not temporary placeholder. King. She wore the doub...
Read article →In Greek mythology, Lamia was a queen of Libya who was so beautiful that Zeus fell in love with her. Hera, discovering the affair, killed Lamia's children. Lamia went mad with grief. She transformed,...
Read article →Ludwig Wittgenstein published one book during his lifetime. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It was seventy-five pages long. Its final line stated that what we cannot speak about we must pass over...
Read article →Six men killed themselves over Carolina Otero. Or so the legend goes. The actual number may be lower, but the fact that people believed six is itself the point. She was the most famous courtesan of th...
Read article →James Joyce spent seven years writing Ulysses. It was banned in the United States for obscenity. It was smuggled across borders in suitcases. It was declared by some critics to be the greatest novel o...
Read article →The Epic of Gilgamesh was written on clay tablets in cuneiform script approximately four thousand years ago. It is the oldest surviving work of narrative literature. It is about a king who has everyth...
Read article →On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a small cabin he had built on the shore of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. He lived there for two years, two months, and two days. He kept a j...
Read article →In 1960, a twenty-six-year-old woman with no university degree walked into the Gombe Stream forest in Tanzania and started watching chimpanzees. The scientific establishment expected her to fail. She...
Read article →Before Louis Pasteur, the medical establishment believed that diseases were caused by bad air, moral failings, or the alignment of celestial bodies. The idea that tiny organisms invisible to the naked...
Read article →Edson Arantes do Nascimento grew up in Bauru, a small city in the interior of Sao Paulo state, so poor that he and his friends played soccer with a grapefruit or a sock stuffed with newspapers because...
Read article →In the year 437 CE, a young man from Constantinople arrived in Athens to study philosophy and found a city that was dying. The great schools still operated, but the Christians who now controlled the R...
Read article →There is a persistent misunderstanding about Robert Frost that goes something like this: he was a gentle old farmer who wrote pretty poems about snow and stone walls and the woods. This is wrong in ne...
Read article →In 922 CE, in the city of Baghdad, a Sufi mystic named Mansur al-Hallaj was executed in a manner designed to be unforgettable. He was flogged, his hands and feet were cut off, he was hung on a gibbet,...
Read article →When Vishnu needed to save the universe from the demons who had seized the nectar of immortality, he did not reach for a weapon. He did not send an army. He transformed himself into the most beautiful...
Read article →In the beginning, the world was dark. Not metaphorically dark, not spiritually dark, but actually dark: no sun, no moon, no stars. An old chief kept the light locked in a series of nested boxes inside...
Read article →Around the year 1250, a woman in northern Germany began writing about her visions of God in language so intimate that it made the Church uncomfortable. Mechthild of Magdeburg was a Beguine, a lay reli...
Read article →Helena Petrovna Blavatsky arrived in New York in 1873 with almost no money, a thick Russian accent, and a set of ideas that would scandalize and fascinate the Western world in roughly equal measure. S...
Read article →Porphyry of Tyre was born around 234 CE into a world where the old gods were losing. Christianity was spreading through the Roman Empire with a momentum that philosophy could not match, and Porphyry k...
Read article →On December 14, 1900, Max Planck stood before the German Physical Society in Berlin and presented a formula that he did not entirely believe. The formula worked. It perfectly described how objects emi...
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