Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
In the first century CE, Alexandria was the most intellectually crowded city on earth. Greek philosophers argued in the same streets where Jewish scholars debated Torah. Egyptian priests performed rit...
Read article →Rachel Carson spent her childhood in a small Pennsylvania town eighteen miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, close enough to smell the chemical plants but far enough to lose herself in the wo...
Read article →Kali stands on the body of her husband Shiva, tongue out, eyes wild, a garland of severed heads around her neck, blood dripping from her hands. This is the image most people encounter first, and most...
Read article →According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the god was born at dawn, invented the lyre by noon, and stole fifty sacred cattle from Apollo before sunset. He was less than twelve hours old. When Apollo tr...
Read article →Johann Sebastian Bach wrote over a thousand compositions. He wrote a new cantata nearly every week for years. He wrote the Mass in B Minor. He wrote the St. Matthew Passion. He wrote the Well-Tempered...
Read article →In 480 BCE, the Persian Empire sent the largest army the ancient world had ever assembled to conquer Greece. King Xerxes brought, according to Herodotus, over a million soldiers, though modern estimat...
Read article →Kurt Cobain did not invent grunge. He did not invent punk. He did not invent the quiet-loud-quiet song structure that Nirvana made famous. What he did was take all of these things, add a voice that so...
Read article →On March 15, 44 BCE, approximately sixty senators surrounded Julius Caesar in the Theatre of Pompey and stabbed him twenty-three times. He was the most powerful man in the Roman world. He had conquere...
Read article →In 2019, Joy Harjo became the first Native American to serve as United States Poet Laureate. She held the position for three consecutive terms, longer than anyone in over two decades. She also plays s...
Read article →Around the year 1000, a Norse sailor named Leif Erikson landed on the coast of North America. He built a settlement. He spent a winter there. He went home. Nobody in Europe particularly cared. Five ce...
Read article →Julia Child was six feet two inches tall, thirty-six years old, and living in Paris when she ate her first real French meal. It was sole meuniere at a restaurant called La Couronne in Rouen. She later...
Read article →Before Martin Luther King Jr. became Martin Luther King Jr., he was a seminary student at Boston University. In the library, he found a book called Jesus and the Disinherited, written by a theologian...
Read article →In 218 BCE, a Carthaginian general decided to invade Italy by walking through the Alps. He brought approximately fifty thousand soldiers, nine thousand cavalry, and thirty-seven war elephants. The Rom...
Read article →Peter Abelard was the most famous philosopher in twelfth-century Paris. Heloise d''Argenteuil was his student. She was seventeen. He was nearly forty. What happened between them would become one of th...
Read article →The Greek pantheon has a management problem. Zeus is nominally in charge, but he spends most of his time transforming into animals to seduce mortals. Someone has to actually run things. That someone i...
Read article →James Dean completed three films. He died in a car crash at twenty-four. He has been famous for seventy years. The math does not add up unless you understand that what Dean sold was not a performance...
Read article →Johann Wolfgang von Goethe started writing Faust when he was in his twenties. He finished it in his eighties, weeks before he died. Sixty years with the same story. Sixty years trying to answer a ques...
Read article →There is a Daoist master who could ride the wind. Not metaphorically. The texts say he literally mounted the air and traveled wherever he wanted, effortlessly, above the ground. His name was Liezi, an...
Read article →In 1998, Lauryn Hill released The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and it sold more copies in its first week than any album by a solo female artist in history at that point. She won five Grammy Awards in a...
Read article →The story of Guinevere is usually told as a love triangle. Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere. The king, the knight, the queen who betrayed them both. It is one of the oldest stories in European literature a...
Read article →In the tenth century, inside a Benedictine convent in Saxony, a woman named Hrotsvitha sat down and wrote six plays. She was the first known playwright in Europe since the fall of Rome. She wrote come...
Read article →Jorge Luis Borges began losing his sight in his thirties. By 1955, when the Argentine government appointed him director of the National Library, he was almost completely blind. A library of eight hund...
Read article →Louise Gluck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, and the committee cited her unmistakable poetic voice that makes individual existence universal. Most people had never heard of her. This was, i...
Read article →A monk asked Linji what to do if he met the Buddha on the road. Linji said kill him. The monk presumably stood there for a while trying to figure out what had just happened. This is the most famous li...
Read article →
