Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Jean Grey has a relationship with death that no other hero can understand. She has died. She has been resurrected. She has merged with a cosmic entity that eats stars. She has been consumed by fire an...
Read article →The most important moment in Swamp Thing's history is when Alan Moore rewrote everything. Alec Holland did not survive the explosion and become Swamp Thing. Alec Holland died. The swamp absorbed his c...
Read article →The Night the Self Disappeared In 1977, a twenty-nine-year-old German graduate student at the University of London woke in the middle of the night with a feeling of absolute dread. He had been depress...
Read article →The Cork-Lined Bedroom In 1907, Marcel Proust retreated to a bedroom at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, lined the walls with cork to block out sound, covered the windows to block out light, and bega...
Read article →The Whale Book That Sank In November 1851, Herman Melville published Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. He was thirty-two years old and at the height of his powers. He had poured everything he knew — about wha...
Read article →Found Delirious in Someone Else's Clothes On October 3, 1849, a printer named Joseph Walker found a man slumped on a bench outside a Baltimore tavern. The man was semiconscious, wearing shabby clothes...
Read article →The Woman They Called the Ugliest in London In the literary circles of 1850s London, Mary Ann Evans was known for two things: her extraordinary intelligence and what her contemporaries called, with th...
Read article →The Most Talented Person Who Ever Lived Had a Completion Problem Leonardo da Vinci left behind approximately 7,200 pages of notebooks. They contain designs for flying machines, submarines, tanks, sola...
Read article →He Set the Type Himself On July 4, 1855 — the date was deliberate — a slim volume of poetry appeared in Brooklyn bookshops. It had no author name on the cover, just a title: Leaves of Grass. Inside, f...
Read article →The Insurance Clerk Who Dreamed of Insects Every morning, Franz Kafka put on a suit, walked to the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, and spent eight hours processing claims about workpl...
Read article →The Woman in White Who Refused the World By her early thirties, Emily Dickinson had largely stopped leaving her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. By her forties, she would not meet visitors face...
Read article →The Sculptor Who Did Not Want to Paint In 1508, Pope Julius II summoned Michelangelo Buonarroti to Rome and told him to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was thirty-three years old...
Read article →The Teacher Who Became a Wanderer In the spring of 1689, Matsuo Basho sold his house in Edo — modern-day Tokyo — gave away most of his possessions, and set out on foot for the northern provinces of Ja...
Read article →The Aristocrat Who Wanted Certainty Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 into one of the most prominent families in British politics. His grandfather had been Prime Minister twice. He was orphaned at thr...
Read article →The Night Everything Changed In January 1610, a forty-five-year-old mathematics professor in Padua pointed a homemade telescope at Jupiter and saw something that should not have been there. Four tiny...
Read article →He Knew What He Had Found and It Terrified Him In 1838, Charles Darwin opened his notebook and wrote a sentence that would eventually detonate the foundations of Western thought. He had figured out na...
Read article →The Secret Life of the World's Greatest Scientist When Isaac Newton died in 1727, his executors found something unexpected among his papers. Alongside the manuscripts on optics, calculus, and gravitat...
Read article →Three Minutes to Die On December 22, 1849, in Semyonov Square in St. Petersburg, twenty-eight-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky stood in a line of prisoners, wearing a white execution shroud, waiting to be s...
Read article →The Man Who Saw Too Clearly On January 3, 1889, in a street in Turin, Italy, Friedrich Nietzsche watched a coachman beating a horse. He ran to the animal, threw his arms around its neck, and collapsed...
Read article →A Monk Walks Into Boston In September 1920, a twenty-seven-year-old Indian monk named Mukunda Lal Ghosh — by then known as Swami Yogananda — stepped off a ship in Boston Harbor. He had been sent by hi...
Read article →The Rich Boy Who Stripped Naked in the Town Square In 1206, in the central square of Assisi, a young man named Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone — Francis — stood before the local bishop, his furious f...
Read article →The Professor Who Couldn't Stop Searching In the early 1960s, Richard Alpert had everything an ambitious academic could want. A psychology professorship at Harvard. A Mercedes, a Cessna airplane, a sa...
Read article →He pulled islands from the sea. He lassoed the sun to make the days longer. He stole fire from the underworld and gave it to humanity. Maui, the demigod of Polynesian mythology, performed feats that n...
Read article →The scariest villain in Stranger Things is not a creature from another dimension. He is a boy named Henry Creel who grew up in a house where his father hit his mother and nobody came to help. Vecna is...
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