Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
In 1571, a French nobleman retired from public life at the age of thirty-eight, climbed to the third floor of a stone tower on his estate in the Dordogne, and began writing about himself. He called wh...
Read article →She nearly died of polio at age nine in Saskatoon. She taught herself guitar from a Pete Seeger instruction book because she could not afford lessons. She moved to Toronto, gave a baby up for adoption...
Read article →Raven Darkholme has been alive for over a century in the Marvel timeline. She can look like anyone. She has been a senator, a spy, a mother, an assassin, a headmistress, and a revolutionary. Of all th...
Read article →The earliest version of Lilith appears in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval satirical text that most rabbinical scholars do not consider canonical. In it, Lilith is Adam's first wife, created from...
Read article →A thirteenth-century Beguine in Flanders wrote poems about divine love with an intensity that makes most secular love poetry sound polite. Hadewijch of Antwerp did not approach God gently. She approac...
Read article →Joan Didion weighed about seventy-five pounds toward the end. She had always been small, but the smallness became a kind of statement, as though the act of paying attention to everything had consumed...
Read article →He was twenty-five when he died. He had been writing seriously for roughly four years. In that time, John Keats produced Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, The Eve of St. Agnes, an...
Read article →In the Tale of Genji, the world''s first novel, there is a woman whose jealousy becomes so powerful that it separates from her body, drifts across Heian-kyo like smoke, and possesses the women her lov...
Read article →On September 12, 1992, the Space Shuttle Endeavour launched from Kennedy Space Center carrying a woman who had been a chemical engineer, a Peace Corps medical officer, a dancer, and a general practiti...
Read article →Somewhere around the eighth century BCE, a woman looked at a pile of wealth and asked a question that still unsettles people: can any of this make me immortal? The woman was Maitreyi. The wealth belon...
Read article →He huffs. He puffs. He blows the house down. Three little pigs, three construction materials, one predator with powerful lungs and an appetite. The Big Bad Wolf is the most recognizable villain in fai...
Read article →Raymond Chandler did not create the hardboiled detective genre. Dashiell Hammett did that. What Chandler created was the detective who notices the light falling through a window while someone bleeds o...
Read article →In a world full of identical robots, one looks at its creator and asks why. Not how, not what. Why did you make me. That question is the entire philosophical weight of I, Robot condensed into a single...
Read article →He is eleven years old, sleeping in a cupboard under the stairs, and by the end of the school year he will have faced a dark wizard and nearly died. He is twelve and nearly dies again. Thirteen, fourt...
Read article →The Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and the only human who survives is a man in a bathrobe who had been trying to prevent the demolition of his house that same morning. Dougla...
Read article →He is inflatable. He is slow. He gets stuck in doorways. His medical knowledge is comprehensive, his emotional intelligence is surprisingly advanced, and his primary directive is to help. Baymax is a...
Read article →The demon barber does not start as a demon. He starts as Benjamin Barker, a wrongfully imprisoned man who returns to London to find that Judge Turpin has stolen his wife and his daughter. The razor he...
Read article →No one fights like Gaston. No one bites like Gaston. No one's neck is as incredibly thick as Gaston's. The entire village sings his praises in a pub song that doubles as a character study, and the gen...
Read article →The T-800 walks through walls by breaking them. The T-1000 walks through walls by becoming them. James Cameron introduced the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day as the upgrade that rendered every pr...
Read article →A fifteen-year-old boy puts his hand in a box. The box contains pain, escalating pain, pain that simulates his flesh being burned away layer by layer. Behind him stands an old woman holding a poisoned...
Read article →A man with a shotgun and a scar walks through the streets of West Baltimore, and everyone runs. Not because he is a gangster. Because he robs gangsters. Omar Little is the most beloved character in a...
Read article →Peter Griffin has dropped his infant daughter. He has fought a giant chicken across an entire city. He has started a cult, joined a terrorist cell by accident, and once turned the family living room i...
Read article →Nobody in The Wheel of Time wants to be ta''veren, the pattern's chosen instruments who bend probability around themselves like gravity bends light. Rand al'Thor accepts it with grim determination. Pe...
Read article →Pride and Prejudice is a romance, but the first hundred pages read like a prosecution. Mr. Darcy enters Meryton, refuses to dance with Elizabeth Bennet, declares her merely tolerable, and proceeds to...
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