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Nico Robin is a main character in One Piece by Eiichiro Oda. She is the archaeologist of the Straw Hat Pirates and the sole survivor of the island of Ohara, which was destroyed by the World Government...
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Nico Robin has been running since she was eight years old. That was when the World Government destroyed her home island of Ohara — burned it to ash, killed every scholar, sank every book — because the...
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Toni Morrison (1931-2019), born Chloe Anthony Wofford, was an American novelist, essayist, editor, and professor. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, becoming the first African American wom...
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Toni Morrison did not write for white readers. She said this explicitly. She said that the gaze of the white reader was not her concern, that she wrote for Black people, about Black people, in a langu...
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Spike Spiegel is the protagonist of Cowboy Bebop, a 26-episode anime series created by Shinichiro Watanabe and produced by Sunrise, which aired in 1998-1999. Spike is a bounty hunter (called a cowboy...
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Spike Spiegel drifts through the solar system in a ship called the Bebop, catching bounties and not caring whether he catches them. He eats instant noodles. He fights beautifully. He is funny when he...
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Atticus Finch is the central moral figure in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee. He is a widowed lawyer in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression who defends Tom R...
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Atticus Finch is a lawyer in Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s. He is assigned to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, in a case where the evidence clearly supports a...
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Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. His economical, understated prose style influenced 20th-century...
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Ernest Hemingway revolutionized English prose by removing everything from it. No adjectives if a noun would do. No explanation if action could show. No sentiment if the reader could feel it on their o...
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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a German composer and pianist widely regarded as one of the greatest composers in Western music history. He was a crucial figure in the transition between the Clas...
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Ludwig van Beethoven began losing his hearing in his late twenties. By the premiere of his Ninth Symphony in 1824 — the symphony that contains the Ode to Joy, one of the most recognizable pieces of mu...
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Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was an American theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics (QED). He is widely regarded as one of the...
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Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum electrodynamics. He cracked safes at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. He played bongo drums in Brazilian samba bands. He...
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Mark Twain (1835-1910), born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an American writer, humorist, and lecturer widely regarded as the greatest American author of the 19th century. His works include Adventures...
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Samuel Clemens chose the pen name Mark Twain because it sounded like a riverboat call from the life he left behind. He then used that name to produce the funniest, most savage body of work in American...
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Ryomen Sukuna is the primary antagonist of Jujutsu Kaisen, a manga and anime series created by Gege Akutami. Known as the King of Curses, Sukuna was a powerful sorcerer who lived over 1,000 years ago...
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Ryomen Sukuna is the King of Curses — a being so powerful that even after his death a millennium ago, his severed fingers retain enough cursed energy to create catastrophic disasters. When Yuji Itador...
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Totoro is the titular character of My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro), a 1988 animated film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli. Totoro is a large, gentle forest sp...
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My Neighbor Totoro contains no villain, no conflict in the traditional sense, and no dramatic climax. Two young girls move to the countryside with their father while their mother is in the hospital. T...
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Katniss Everdeen is the protagonist of The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, published between 2008 and 2010. She is a 16-year-old girl from District 12, the poorest district in the dystopian n...
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Katniss Everdeen volunteered as tribute to save her sister. That is the entire story. Everything else — the revolution, the political machinations, the love triangle, the propaganda wars — is conseque...
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Light Yagami is the protagonist of Death Note, a manga series written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, serialized from 2003 to 2006 in Shonen Jump. He is a high school student who dis...
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Light Yagami is a seventeen-year-old genius with perfect grades, a loving family, and a future so bright it is boring. Then he finds a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it, and withi...
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