Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
In 1851, at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, a tall Black woman stood up and spoke. She was about fifty-four years old. She had been born into slavery in New York, had been sold four times...
Read article →In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson published an essay called Self-Reliance that told every person who read it to trust themselves more than any institution, tradition, or authority. It is the most American...
Read article →Malcolm X changed his name four times, his religion twice, his political philosophy three times, and was murdered for the last transformation, which was also the most dangerous one: he started believi...
Read article →Ray Charles Robinson went blind at age seven from glaucoma. By that point he had already seen his younger brother drown in a washtub, already watched his mother work herself into permanent exhaustion...
Read article →Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote music that makes strangers cry in public. The second movement of his Sixth Symphony does this reliably. Swan Lake does it. The Andante cantabile from the First String Qu...
Read article →Diane Perry was a librarian in London. She read a book about Buddhism, felt something she could not explain, and by age twenty was on a ship to India. She ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun under the...
Read article →Plato says Socrates learned rhetoric from Aspasia. Let that settle for a moment. The father of Western philosophy, the man who invented the method of questioning that bears his name, credited a woman...
Read article →Freddie Mercury walked on stage at Wembley Stadium on July 13, 1985, in front of 72,000 people and an estimated 1.9 billion television viewers worldwide, and he owned all of them within thirty seconds...
Read article →The story most people know about Rosa Parks is wrong. The version taught in elementary schools goes like this: a tired seamstress sat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, and was too...
Read article →Calcifer is a fire demon bound to Howl's Moving Castle by a contract neither party fully understands. He powers the castle. He heats the water. He cooks breakfast. He is an ancient being of immense ma...
Read article →Captain Hook is terrified of a ticking crocodile. The crocodile ate his hand and liked the taste and has been following him ever since, waiting to finish the meal. The crocodile also swallowed a clock...
Read article →Ahsoka Tano was fourteen when she became Anakin Skywalker's Padawan. She was seventeen when the Jedi Order wrongfully accused her of bombing the Jedi Temple, expelled her, and put her on trial for mur...
Read article →Baymax is a robot. He is white, inflatable, and roughly the shape and texture of a marshmallow. He was built by Tadashi Hamada to be a personal healthcare companion, programmed with ten thousand medic...
Read article →Katara was eight years old when the Fire Nation came to the Southern Water Tribe and killed her mother. Kya died protecting Katara, lying to the raiders about being the last waterbender so that her da...
Read article →Marceline is over a thousand years old. She has outlived everyone she has ever loved except Bubblegum, and even that relationship broke apart for centuries before it healed. She is a vampire who does...
Read article →Chandler Bing makes a joke every time something gets serious. When his parents divorce in a way that humiliates him publicly, he makes a joke. When he falls in love and is terrified of commitment, he...
Read article →Daenerys Targaryen walked into a funeral pyre and emerged with three dragons. She was sold into marriage as a child, widowed before she was twenty, and exiled to a continent where nobody knew her name...
Read article →Jeffrey Lebowski, known as The Dude, is unemployed, unmarried, and unbothered. He lives in a small apartment in Venice, California. He bowls. He drinks White Russians. He has a rug that ties the room...
Read article →Count Dracula does not sleep. He does not eat food. He does not age, grow, or change. He exists in a state of permanent hunger, feeding on the living because he cannot be one of them anymore. Bram Sto...
Read article →San was thrown to the wolves as a baby. Her parents, desperate to escape the wolf goddess Moro, sacrificed their child to save themselves. Moro took San in, raised her as a wolf cub, and San grew up w...
Read article →C-3PO is a protocol droid. He was built for etiquette, translation, and diplomatic relations. He has been dragged through a galactic civil war, shot at by stormtroopers, dismembered by Ugnaughts, near...
Read article →Anandamayi Ma (1896-1982) was an Indian mystic widely regarded as one of the most important spiritual figures of twentieth-century India. Gandhi, Nehru, and Indira Gandhi all sought her counsel. What...
Read article →Keith Haring (1958-1990) was an American artist whose bold, graphic style became one of the most recognizable visual languages of the twentieth century. He began drawing in New York subway stations an...
Read article →Iamblichus (c. 245-325 CE) was a Syrian Neoplatonist philosopher who transformed Platonism by insisting spiritual ascent requires theurgic ritual alongside intellectual contemplation. What Did He Chan...
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