How Leonard Woolf Critiqued Bloomsbury from Within
...for denying the life of the colonized.” The philosophy of the “good” he had learned at Cambridge University didn’t sit well with, for instance, a botched hanging that turned into...
How a Fake Supergroup Mocked the Real Thing
“The newest escalation in the never-ending rock hype is an album called The Masked Marauders,” wrote a columnist in a November 1969 issue of the underground newspaper The Seed. So...
The Heretical Origins of the Sonnet
...Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and in its celebration of secular love there are antecedents in Sufism. “The idea that a beloved woman can be the manifestation of divinity or the...
Libraries and Pandemics: Past and Present
...to information. The Bill was adopted by the Des Moines Public Library board, and later became an important guiding document for American librarianship writ large. These changes in library philosophy,...
Spectra: The Poetry Movement That Was All a Hoax
...extracted the whole of the Spectric philosophy.” They later added a third member, poet Marjorie Allen Seiffert, who wrote under the name Elijah Hay. Lucky for them, this era also...
The Mathematical Pranksters behind Nicolas Bourbaki
...mark on the style, culture, philosophy, and values of postwar mathematics, and many of his collaborators made influential careers under their own names. By the 1970s, however, the mathematical and...
Alien Evolution, Texting while Walking, and a Maya Life
...evolution means that complex alien life forms are likely to develop many of the same features as the life we know, perhaps including art and philosophy. No, you really shouldn’t...
The Claude Glass Revolutionized the Way People Saw Landscapes
The object pictured above is a Claude glass, a key accessory for any circa-1700s British tourist. Here’s how it works: when you arrive at a scenic spot, you turn your...
Kids’ Games in South Africa
...includes diverse musical forms, it focuses on musical knowledge as written in the European musical tradition. “Learning staff notation, Western harmony, and form is at odds with the philosophy, learning...
Can You Be a Good Scientist and a Horrible Person at the Same Time?
The stories we tell about scientists are often heroic. The figure whose breakthrough idea is rejected, forgotten, and then later vindicated is a classic of such narration. Consider Constantin Merezhkowsky...