Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, and activist who became the most famous proponent of existentialism. He declined the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964. What Is Exis...
Read article →Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish descent who was excommunicated at age twenty-three for heretical views. He then wrote the Ethics, one of the most important work...
Read article →Marina Abramovic (born 1946) is a Serbian performance artist who has explored the limits of body, mind, and the performer-audience relationship for over fifty years. What Is The Artist Is Present? In...
Read article →Anna Karenina is the title character of Leo Tolstoy's 1877 novel, widely considered one of the greatest novels ever written. She is a married aristocrat who begins an affair with Count Vronsky and is...
Read article →Lady Rokujo (Rokujo no Miyasudokoro) is a character in Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji who becomes one of the most haunting figures in Japanese literature. Her suppressed jealousy manifests as a...
Read article →Marvin Gaye (1939-1984) was an American singer, songwriter, and producer who helped shape Motown and then transcended it. His album What's Going On (1971) is consistently ranked among the greatest alb...
Read article →Hannibal Barca (247-c. 183 BCE) was a Carthaginian general who led one of the most audacious military campaigns in history. He crossed the Alps with war elephants and invaded Italy, defeating Roman ar...
Read article →Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) was a British political activist who founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and led the militant suffragette movement that secured women's right to vote i...
Read article →Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) was a Catalan architect whose organic, nature-inspired designs transformed Barcelona into one of the world's most distinctive cities. Seven of his works are UNESCO World Herit...
Read article →Julian of Norwich (c. 1342-1416) was an English anchoress and Christian mystic who wrote Revelations of Divine Love, the first book written in English by a woman. She is best known for the phrase all...
Read article →Nina Simone wanted to be a classical pianist. That was the only thing she wanted. She practiced obsessively from age three, played Bach and Beethoven with a precision that astonished her teachers, and...
Read article →Shirin is the woman at the center of Persian literature’s greatest love story, and the remarkable thing about her is not that she loved a king. It is that she loved him on her own terms and refused to...
Read article →William Blake was eight years old when he saw a tree full of angels. He told his parents. His father nearly beat him for lying. Blake spent the remaining sixty-one years of his life seeing things that...
Read article →Teresa of Ávila once prayed to God and received a vision that her struggles were making her stronger. She reportedly replied that it was no wonder He had so few friends when He treated the ones He had...
Read article →Rembrandt van Rijn painted approximately ninety self-portraits over the course of forty years. No artist before him had examined his own face with such persistence, and very few since have matched the...
Read article →In 1927, Werner Heisenberg proved that the universe will not let you know everything at once. Specifically, he demonstrated that you cannot simultaneously know both the exact position and the exact mo...
Read article →William Shakespeare invented over 1,700 words in the English language. He did not do this to show off. He did it because the existing vocabulary was not adequate to describe what he was seeing when he...
Read article →Satsuki is ten years old in My Neighbor Totoro. Her mother is in the hospital with an unspecified illness that nobody will explain honestly. Her father is loving but distracted, working and commuting...
Read article →Federico Fellini kept a dream journal for decades. He drew his dreams in colored pencil — enormous women, circus performers, mysterious priests, impossible architecture, and the recurring image of the...
Read article →Johnny Cash wore black because he said somebody had to. In a song that became his manifesto, he explained that the dark clothes were for the poor and the beaten down, for the prisoner who has long pai...
Read article →Zaphod Beeblebrox is the President of the Imperial Galactic Government. He has two heads, three arms, and the attention span of a caffeinated goldfish. On the day of his inauguration, he stole the Hea...
Read article →Jay Gatsby built a mansion across the bay from Daisy Buchanan's house. He filled it with people he did not know, threw parties he did not enjoy, and stared at a green light on her dock every night for...
Read article →Lady Eboshi runs Iron Town. She mines iron from the mountains, smelts it into weapons, and sells it to feudal warlords. To do this, she is systematically destroying the ancient forest that surrounds h...
Read article →Hatshepsut became pharaoh of Egypt around 1478 BCE, and the first thing she had to solve was a language problem. Egyptian did not have a word for a female king. The title of pharaoh was grammatically...
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