Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the oldest philosophical texts in human history, a woman named Gargi Vachaknavi stands up in a public assembly of scholars and challenges the sage Yajnavalkya t...
Read article →The gunfight near the O.K. Corral lasted approximately thirty seconds. Thirty rounds were fired. Three men died. Nobody agrees on who shot first, who was armed, or whether the Earps were enforcing the...
Read article →The Tale of the Heike, the great Japanese war epic of the Genpei War, describes a warrior named Tomoe Gozen as having long black hair, a fair complexion, and a beauty that few could match. It also des...
Read article →The rule was simple. Walk out of the underworld. Do not look back. Eurydice will follow. The sunlight is ahead. You have already done the impossible: you have sung so beautifully that Hades himself, t...
Read article →In 1187, Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, known to the West as Saladin, recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders after eighty-eight years of Christian occupation. When the Crusaders had taken the city in...
Read article →The Trojan War lasted ten years. The journey home lasted another ten. Odysseus left Ithaca as a young king and returned as a middle-aged stranger, unrecognized by everyone except his dog, who wagged h...
Read article →Before Zoroaster, the moral universe was complicated. The gods of ancient polytheism were not good or evil. They were powerful, capricious, and transactional. You gave them sacrifices. They gave you r...
Read article →For over a thousand years, the most powerful people in the ancient Mediterranean world traveled to a small temple on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in central Greece to ask a woman a question. The woma...
Read article →The fairy godmother is the most overworked figure in all of folklore. She appears when things are worst, waves a wand, solves the problem, and disappears before anyone can ask her how she is doing. Sh...
Read article →Ororo Munroe was born in Harlem, raised in Cairo, orphaned by a bomb that killed her parents and buried her alive in rubble, and worshipped as a goddess in Kenya before she was twenty years old. Then...
Read article →The original Rapunzel story, published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, is a story about a girl locked in a tower by a witch who uses the girl's hair as a rope. A prince climbs up. The witch finds out....
Read article →Around the year 1000 CE, a woman serving as lady-in-waiting to Empress Teishi in the Heian court of Japan began keeping a notebook. She wrote lists. She wrote observations. She wrote opinions so sharp...
Read article →The Imitation of Christ has been in continuous print for over five hundred years. It has been translated into more languages than any Christian text except the Bible. It was the favorite book of Ignat...
Read article →A Western monk once asked Ajahn Chah if he could summarize the entirety of Buddhist teaching in a single sentence. Chah picked up a cup of tea, held it out, and said: nothing is mine. The monk waited...
Read article →Annie Dillard once locked eyes with a weasel. She was walking near Hollins Pond in Virginia, came around a bend, and there it was, crouched on a log, staring at her. Their eyes met. The weasel did not...
Read article →The gods of Asgard raised a wolf. They fed him. They let him grow. And then, when he was large enough to swallow the sun, they realized what they had done and decided to chain him to a rock until the...
Read article →In 1227, a twenty-seven-year-old Japanese monk returned from four years of study in China and said something that Zen Buddhism is still trying to fully absorb eight hundred years later. He said that m...
Read article →Bassui Tokusho was born in 1327 in Japan. His mother died shortly after his birth, and the monks at his father's funeral told the young boy that the soul survives death. Bassui, who was perhaps five y...
Read article →In 1373, a thirty-year-old woman in Norwich, England, fell so ill that a priest was called to administer last rites. As she lay dying, she experienced sixteen visions of Christ over the course of seve...
Read article →The story goes like this. An Indian monk traveled to China in the fifth or sixth century, walked into a cave near the Shaolin Temple, sat down facing the wall, and did not move for nine years. When he...
Read article →Audre Lorde described herself as a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet. She listed those identities in that order, deliberately, because she understood that every single one of them was a reason som...
Read article →Charles Dickens was an insomniac who walked. He walked through London at two in the morning, through three in the morning, through the hours when the city belonged to the homeless and the desperate an...
Read article →Dolly Parton grew up in a one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, one of twelve children, sharing a bed with several siblings, without electricity or running water. By the time she was eighteen, sh...
Read article →The final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer ends with a crater where Sunnydale used to be and a teenage girl standing at its edge, smiling. She has just destroyed the Hellmouth, lost her home, lost...
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