Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Branch Rickey told Jackie Robinson he needed a player brave enough not to fight back. Robinson said he had plenty of fight in him. Rickey said he needed a man brave enough not to use it. That conversa...
Read article →Lalleshwari walked out of her marriage, removed her clothing, and wandered through fourteenth-century Kashmir singing poems that would become the foundation of Kashmiri literature. She was not making...
Read article →Solitude vs Loneliness: How to Tell the Difference From the Inside People use these words interchangeably, but they describe experiences that are almost opposite in their emotional texture. Loneliness...
Read article →Grief That Has No Name: Ambiguous Loss and How to Cope Most of what culture teaches about grief assumes a clear ending. Someone dies. Something ends. There is a before and an after. Mourning has a sha...
Read article →The original Goldilocks story ends with a girl running away from three bears and presumably learning a lesson about breaking into other people's homes. This version of Goldilocks did not learn that le...
Read article →In 1856, an Augustinian friar in the city of Brno began growing peas in the monastery garden. He grew twenty-nine thousand plants over eight years. He counted them. He measured them. He crossed smooth...
Read article →On October 5, 1877, after a fighting retreat of over 1,170 miles across some of the most brutal terrain in North America, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce surrendered to the United States Army. He was ex...
Read article →In 1896, a Parisian dancer named Cleo de Merode was photographed so many times that her face appeared on postcards, chocolate boxes, soap advertisements, and cigarette cards across Europe and America....
Read article →Around 1177, a pharmacist in the Persian city of Nishapur wrote a poem about thirty birds who journey to find the Simorgh, a legendary bird said to be the king of all birds. The journey takes them acr...
Read article →In the beginning, or in one of the beginnings because Coyote stories do not agree on a single origin, Coyote was there. He was there before the humans. He was there before the rivers had found their b...
Read article →William H. Bonney died on July 14, 1881, shot in the dark by Sheriff Pat Garrett in a bedroom in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. He was twenty-one years old. He had killed at least four men, possibly eight,...
Read article →Amy Winehouse had a voice that sounded like it had already survived everything she was singing about. When she recorded Back to Black in 2006, she was twenty-three years old and singing about heartbre...
Read article →In 1958, Akira Kurosawa released The Hidden Fortress, a film about a grizzled general escorting a princess through enemy territory, accompanied by two bickering peasants who provide comic relief. Nine...
Read article →The first sentence of Anna Karenina is the most famous opening in the history of the novel: happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Tolstoy wrote it as a thesis s...
Read article →On October 27, 1915, the ship Endurance was crushed by Antarctic pack ice and sank. Twenty-eight men stood on a frozen ocean, watching their only way home disappear beneath the surface. They had no ra...
Read article →In 1405, a woman in Paris published a book arguing that women were not intellectually inferior to men, that the misogyny in popular literature was the product of male insecurity, and that the history...
Read article →Eleanor Roosevelt received death threats so regularly that the Secret Service assigned her a bodyguard. She refused to carry the gun they gave her but agreed to take pistol lessons so she could stop p...
Read article →Before there were stories, all the tales in the world belonged to Nyame, the Sky God. They were locked in a golden box on his throne, and nobody on earth could tell a story because Nyame owned every s...
Read article →George Herman Ruth Jr. was sent to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore at the age of seven. His parents could not or would not take care of him. He stayed there for twelve years. The sc...
Read article →Baron Samedi wears a top hat, dark glasses, and a tailcoat. He has cotton plugs in his nostrils because he is dressed for his own burial. He drinks rum infused with twenty-one hot peppers. He smokes c...
Read article →Empress Theodora of Byzantium started life as a performer in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. The precise nature of her performances is contested by historians and exaggerated by her enemies, but the...
Read article →In 1963, a twenty-eight-year-old journalist named Gloria Steinem put on a bunny costume, stuffed the bodice with dry cleaner bags, and went to work at the New York Playboy Club. She was there to write...
Read article →Galadriel has lived for over seven thousand years. She was born in the Undying Lands before the sun and moon existed. She crossed the Helcaraxe, the grinding ice between continents, on foot. She fough...
Read article →In 1499, a man named Nanak walked into the Kali Bein river near Sultanpur Lodhi in Punjab and did not come out. His clothes were found on the bank. The town assumed he had drowned. Search parties foun...
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