Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
There is a moment at the end of the first book, the first season, where Daenerys Targaryen steps into a burning funeral pyre carrying three petrified dragon eggs. Everyone watching, every character in...
Read article →In the 1860s, at the height of a dinner party attended by some of the wealthiest men in France, a massive silver platter was carried into the dining room by four servants. The lid was lifted to reveal...
Read article →In Norse mythology, the death of Baldur is not just a tragedy. It is the event that triggers Ragnarok, the destruction of the entire cosmos. One god dies and the universe ends. That is how much the No...
Read article →Every other Olympian god had admirers. Zeus had temples on every mountaintop. Athena had the Parthenon. Apollo had Delphi. Even Hades, lord of the dead, was respected enough to receive regular offerin...
Read article →Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential in 2000 and destroyed the romantic notion of the restaurant kitchen in about 300 pages. Before that book, most people imagined chefs as artists in white...
Read article →In twelfth-century Karnataka, a woman took off her clothes, walked away from her husband the king, and wandered through the countryside composing devotional poetry to Shiva. She was not mad. She was n...
Read article →She cried during sermons. She cried during meals. She cried in the streets of Jerusalem, on the roads of Germany, in the churches of Rome, and in the marketplaces of King's Lynn. She cried so loudly a...
Read article →In 1440, a German cardinal published a book arguing that God was infinite, that infinity meant the coincidence of all opposites, and that human knowledge of God was therefore a form of learned ignoran...
Read article →What is the sound of one hand clapping? The question is so famous that people forget it was invented by a specific person, a Japanese Zen monk named Hakuin Ekaku who was also one of the most important...
Read article →In 1892, three of her friends were lynched in Memphis. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart owned a grocery store that was competing with a white-owned store across the street. A mob dragged...
Read article →He was a rabbi, a physician, a philosopher, and a refugee. Moses ben Maimon, known as Maimonides, fled Cordoba when the Almohad dynasty conquered it, wandered North Africa for years, and eventually se...
Read article →A monk asked Joshu: does a dog have Buddha nature? Joshu said: Mu. The word means no, or nothing, or has no, depending on the translation. It is also the most famous koan in the Zen tradition, the fir...
Read article →When the court doubted his devotion, Hanuman ripped open his own chest and revealed Rama and Sita living in his heart. The image is one of the most reproduced in Hindu art: the monkey god with his rib...
Read article →Thirteen fairies were available. Twelve were invited. The one who was left out showed up anyway and cursed the princess to death by spindle. Sleeping Beauty is taught as a story about good versus evil...
Read article →She did not want to write it. Her publisher, Thomas Niles, suggested a book for girls. Alcott thought it was a terrible idea. She was interested in Gothic thrillers, sensational fiction, and stories a...
Read article →John Glenn refused to fly until Katherine Johnson had personally verified the numbers. The electronic computer had run the orbital equations for his Friendship 7 mission. Glenn did not trust it. He tr...
Read article →Somewhere in thirteenth-century Spain, a text appeared that claimed to be the secret teachings of a second-century rabbi named Shimon bar Yochai, dictated while he hid in a cave from the Romans for th...
Read article →Yayoi Kusama has been voluntarily living in a psychiatric institution in Tokyo since 1977. Every morning she walks across the street to her studio. She paints. She covers surfaces with polka dots: wal...
Read article →Zeus has a problem. He is the supreme ruler of the cosmos, the wielder of the thunderbolt, the guarantor of oaths and justice, and the father of gods and men. He is also, by any reasonable accounting,...
Read article →Richard Pryor grew up in a brothel in Peoria, Illinois. His grandmother ran it. His mother worked in it. His father was a pimp. He was sexually abused as a child. He started performing comedy in Peori...
Read article →Before Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney was a failed businessman from Missouri. His first animation studio, Laugh-O-Gram Films, went bankrupt in 1923. His first successful character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit,...
Read article →Tara Brach has a phrase she uses in almost every teaching: "This too." It means exactly what it sounds like. Whatever you are feeling right now, whatever pain or fear or shame is moving through your b...
Read article →In December 1577, a small Spanish friar named Juan de la Cruz was kidnapped by members of his own religious order, locked in a cell barely six feet by ten, and left there for nine months. They beat hi...
Read article →Plato was born into Athenian aristocracy around 428 BCE, grew up during a devastating war, watched his city lose an empire, and then watched his teacher Socrates be sentenced to death by a democratic...
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