Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Sometime between the second century BCE and the fourth century CE, a figure known as Patanjali compiled 196 aphorisms about the nature of consciousness, the mechanics of suffering, and the practical s...
Read article →Sometime around 370 CE, a sixteen-year-old boy named Aurelius Augustinus and a group of friends stole pears from a neighbor's orchard in Thagaste, in Roman North Africa. They were not hungry. The pear...
Read article →Before Shams of Tabriz arrived, Rumi was a respected but conventional Islamic scholar in Konya, in what is now Turkey. He taught law, gave sermons, and led a comfortable life of institutional piety. T...
Read article →Isaac Luria arrived in Safed in 1570 and died in 1572. He was thirty-eight years old. In those two years he transformed Jewish mysticism so completely that every Kabbalistic text written after him is,...
Read article →Plotinus would not allow anyone to paint his portrait. When his student Amelius suggested it, Plotinus replied with a question that has echoed through philosophy for eighteen centuries: "Is it not eno...
Read article →Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on May 10, 1940, the day Germany invaded France. He was sixty-five years old. He had been considered a political failure for most of the p...
Read article →Thich Nhat Hanh was exiled from Vietnam in 1966 for the crime of asking both sides to stop killing each other. He had been a Zen Buddhist monk since age sixteen, a university professor, a poet, and th...
Read article →Zora Neale Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida, in 1960. She had been working as a maid. She had published seven books, dozens of short stories, and the most celebrated nov...
Read article →Tupac Amaru Shakur was named after an Incan revolutionary who was executed by the Spanish. His mother, Afeni Shakur, was a Black Panther who was acquitted of conspiracy charges while pregnant with him...
Read article →Set murdered Osiris, dismembered him into fourteen pieces, and scattered the pieces across Egypt. Isis found every one. She reassembled them. She resurrected him long enough to conceive Horus, the fal...
Read article →She was not Spanish. She was born Eliza Rosanna Gilbert in Limerick, Ireland, reinvented herself as the Spanish dancer Lola Montez, performed a dance involving a fake spider crawling out of her skirts...
Read article →In 2010, Marina Abramovic sat in a wooden chair at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for 736 hours and 30 minutes over the course of seventy-five days. Visitors sat across from her, one at a time,...
Read article →He left Venice at seventeen with his father and uncle. He returned twenty-four years later, in 1295, and nobody recognized him. According to one account, his relatives refused to let him into the fami...
Read article →Everyone at Hogwarts thought she was crazy. She talked about Crumple-Horned Snorkacks and Nargles. She wore radish earrings and a butterbeer cork necklace. She read magazines upside down. She was also...
Read article →He studied in China for two years, brought back the esoteric teachings of Vajrayana Buddhism, climbed Mount Koya, and built a monastery that has been continuously occupied for over twelve hundred year...
Read article →The accusations are spectacular: murder, incest, political assassination by poison. Lucrezia Borgia has been called the most dangerous woman in Renaissance Italy for five centuries, and almost none of...
Read article →She married him on one condition: every Saturday, she would be alone, and he would not look. He agreed. They had children. They built castles. They prospered. Then one Saturday, he looked through the...
Read article →He was told not to look. He looked. This is the oldest story in Japan, and it is about the same thing it has always been about: the impossibility of accepting loss and the horror of seeing what loss a...
Read article →She died ten days after giving birth to the girl who would write Frankenstein. Mary Wollstonecraft was thirty-eight. She had published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman two years earlier, the first...
Read article →Einstein told him God does not play dice. Bohr told Einstein to stop telling God what to do. The exchange, reported in multiple forms across decades, captures the central conflict of twentieth-century...
Read article →She walks into a room of adults who are lying to themselves and says the one true thing. She is a teenager in a Gothic black outfit who photographs dead things for art projects and makes friends with...
Read article →There is a scene in Spirited Away where a ten-year-old girl realizes she can no longer remember her own name. The witch Yubaba has taken it from her, replacing Sen on the work contract where Chihiro s...
Read article →There is a moment inside the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona where the afternoon light comes through the stained glass windows on the western facade and the entire interior turns into a forest of color....
Read article →Catherine the Great was not Russian. She was born Sophie Friederike Auguste in the German principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, a place so small that most maps of Europe do not bother to label it. She was br...
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