Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
There is a moment in the pilot episode of Xena: Warrior Princess where Xena buries her weapons and armor. She is done fighting. She has spent years as a warlord, destroying villages, commanding armies...
Read article →He finished War and Peace. He finished Anna Karenina. He looked at two of the greatest novels in any language and decided they were spiritually worthless, that fiction itself was a vanity, and that th...
Read article →The phrase was attributed to a "great princess" by Rousseau in his Confessions, written when Marie Antoinette was nine years old and living in Vienna. She almost certainly never said it. The historica...
Read article →He was twenty-seven when he died. In the seven years between his emergence from the New York street art scene and his death from a heroin overdose in 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat produced over 1,500 dra...
Read article →There is a photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses by James Joyce. It was taken by Eve Arnold in 1955. Monroe is sitting in a playground, in a sweater, absorbed in a book that most English profes...
Read article →In 1964, the Swedish Academy awarded Jean-Paul Sartre the Nobel Prize in Literature. He refused it. He said a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution. The Academy gave it to h...
Read article →She was twelve years old when MGM signed her. They put her on amphetamines to keep her thin and barbiturates to make her sleep. They told her she was too fat. They told her she was not pretty enough....
Read article →A monk asked Huang Po about the nature of mind. Huang Po hit him. The monk asked again. Huang Po hit him again. The monk asked a third time. Huang Po said: if I did not hit you, people would laugh at...
Read article →She was eighty-eight years old when her most famous sculpture was first exhibited. Maman, a thirty-foot steel spider carrying a sac of marble eggs, stands outside museums around the world. When people...
Read article →Stanley Kubrick shot the scene of Jack Nicholson breaking through a door with an axe in The Shining. He shot it again. He shot it again. He shot it somewhere between seventy and eighty times. The crew...
Read article →In 1985, Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple, the company he had co-founded in his parents' garage nine years earlier. The board sided with John Sculley, the CEO Jobs himself had recruited from Pepsi....
Read article →Thomas Merton entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 1941 to disappear from the world. He spent the next twenty-seven years becoming one of the most visible spiritual writers on earth. The con...
Read article →The story of Psyche is the oldest surviving fairy tale in Western literature. A girl is so beautiful that people worship her instead of Venus. The goddess, enraged, sends her son Cupid to make Psyche...
Read article →On October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a saloonkeeper named John Schrank while campaigning in Milwaukee. The bullet passed through his steel eyeglass case and the fifty-page...
Read article →In the Yoruba tradition, Yemoja is the mother of waters. She is the river that feeds the village, the ocean that carries the fisherman home, and the amniotic fluid that holds the unborn child. She is...
Read article →The ancient sources agree on the outline. In 330 BCE, Alexander the Great and his army celebrated their conquest of Persepolis with a banquet. Wine flowed. At some point during the festivities, a woma...
Read article →In 1977, a Kenyan woman named Wangari Maathai asked rural women to plant trees. That is the simplest version of the story. The full version involves a military dictatorship, a divorce court that calle...
Read article →Alison of Bath has been married five times. She buried them all. She is not sorry. She is riding to Canterbury with a group of pilgrims, and before she tells her tale, she delivers a prologue that is...
Read article →The mythology around Thomas Edison holds that he failed ten thousand times before inventing the light bulb. Edison himself corrected the story. He said he had not failed. He had found ten thousand way...
Read article →When Artemis was three years old, according to the Homeric tradition, her father Zeus asked her what gifts she wanted. She asked for eternal virginity, a bow and arrows, a pack of hunting dogs, a shor...
Read article →In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, there is an illustration that appears in almost every surviving copy. A jackal-headed god stands beside a golden scale. On one side of the scale rests the heart of th...
Read article →Frank Lloyd Wright designed 1,114 architectural works. He completed 532 of them. He also burned through two marriages, survived a mass murder at his home, went bankrupt, fled the country, and was arre...
Read article →Before Ireland had kings, before it had monasteries, before it had saints or scholars or the Book of Kells, it had a poet standing on a shoreline shouting into the wind. His name was Amergin, and acco...
Read article →Marcus Tullius Cicero was not born into the Roman aristocracy. He had no military conquests to his name. He never commanded a legion. What he had was a voice that could make senators weep, juries revo...
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