Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Kate Bush (born 1958) is an English singer, songwriter, and producer. In 2022, her 1985 song Running Up That Hill reached number one in multiple countries after being featured in Stranger Things, thir...
Read article →Maui is a trickster demigod who appears across Polynesian cultures from Hawaii to New Zealand. His stories vary by island but share common themes: he is clever, rebellious, and responsible for many fe...
Read article →Circe is a figure from Greek mythology, a goddess who lives on the island of Aeaea and transforms Odysseus's men into swine in Homer's Odyssey. She is the daughter of the sun god Helios. What Happens...
Read article →Black Elk (1863-1950) was an Oglala Lakota medicine man whose account of his visions, recorded in Black Elk Speaks (1932), became one of the most widely read works of Native American spirituality. He...
Read article →Murasaki Shikibu (c. 973-1025) was a Japanese noblewoman at the Imperial court during the Heian period. She wrote The Tale of Genji, widely considered the world's first novel and one of the supreme ac...
Read article →Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) was a Polish-born American rabbi and philosopher who became one of the most important Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. He marched with King at Selma in 1965...
Read article →Mercedes Sosa (1935-2009) was an Argentine singer who became the most important voice of the nueva cancion movement in Latin America. She was known as La Negra and the Voice of the Voiceless. What Was...
Read article →Liane de Pougy (1869-1950) was one of the most celebrated courtesans of Belle Epoque Paris, a dancer at the Folies Bergere, a novelist, and eventually a Dominican nun. How Did She Become Famous? She f...
Read article →Farid ud-Din Attar (c. 1145-1221) was a Persian poet and Sufi mystic who wrote The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq ut-Tayr), one of the most celebrated allegorical poems in world literature. He was al...
Read article →Hades is the Greek god of the dead and ruler of the underworld, the eldest son of Kronos and Rhea, and brother to Zeus and Poseidon. Despite popular misconception, he is not evil or demonic. He is the...
Read article →Faramir is Boromir's younger brother. He is Denethor's less-loved son. He is the captain of Ithilien who operates behind enemy lines with a small company of rangers, fighting a war Gondor is slowly lo...
Read article →Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. Zeus chained him to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains and sent an eagle to eat his liver every day. Every night the liver grew back. Every m...
Read article →Ono no Komachi was the most celebrated beauty of ninth-century Japan, and nearly every poem she wrote is about the impossibility of holding onto anything — beauty, love, youth, even the self. She is r...
Read article →Albert Camus decided the universe was meaningless and then went to the beach. This is not a contradiction. It is the entire point of his philosophy. Born in 1913 in Mondovi, Algeria, to a family so po...
Read article →Bankei Yotaku spent his youth doing everything the Zen tradition told him to do. He meditated until his legs went numb. He fasted until he coughed blood. He sat in a hut through winter without heat. H...
Read article →In the spring of 1952, Rosalind Franklin took an X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA that is now known as Photo 51. It is, objectively, one of the most important images in the history of science. The...
Read article →In seventeenth-century Mexico, a woman had two options: marriage or the convent. Juana Inés de Asbaje looked at the options, calculated which one came with a bigger library, and took the veil. She was...
Read article →In a fictional landscape littered with dysfunctional marriages — the passive-aggressive sitcom couples, the smoldering-resentment literary pairs, the romantic comedies where love means tolerating some...
Read article →Jim Morrison wanted to be a poet. He studied film at UCLA. He read Rimbaud, Blake, Nietzsche, and the French Surrealists. He wrote poems in notebooks and recited them on the rooftop of a Venice Beach...
Read article →Heath Ledger locked himself in a hotel room for six weeks before filming The Dark Knight. He kept a diary. He wrote in it as the Joker. He developed the voice, the mannerisms, the laugh — that laugh —...
Read article →G.I. Gurdjieff built an entire philosophy around a single devastating premise: you are asleep. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. You are actually asleep right now, and everything you believe about y...
Read article →Sadako Yamamura was thrown into a well and left to die. She survived for seven days, alone in the dark, clawing at the walls, before her body finally gave out. In those seven days, her rage became som...
Read article →Paul Atreides can see the future. Not metaphorically. He literally perceives the branching timelines of human civilization and knows which paths lead to survival and which lead to extinction. He also...
Read article →Mark Grayson's father is the most powerful superhero on Earth. Nolan Grayson, known as Omni-Man, can fly, is nearly indestructible, and has spent decades protecting humanity. Mark inherits these power...
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