IN March 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers here was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books. Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg, the ones that the doomsayers proclaim — with glee or dread — will go the way of vinyl records. More...
Approaching Gertrude Stein’s writing critically is tricky. Because she strove to reshape literary conventions — syntax, language usage, narrative order and the sense of making sense — any comment on her choices may already be rebuffed in her poetics and practice. Stein is a trickster. This may be why, as I read “Ida” and “Stanzas in Meditation,” both reissued in corrected, authoritative editions from Yale University Press, I remembered a Jonathan Richman lyric I’ll paraphrase as “Pablo Picasso never got called a jackass.” More...
Whatever art form you're interested in—television, film, theater, literature, cinema, radio—you can't miss Charles Dickens these days. The question is, why? More...
A new crop of digital books comes loaded with videos, songs, animated shorts and pop-up graphics. Is this the future of publishing? More...
He was born in 1564 in a provincial English town, educated at the local grammar school, and became the greatest playwright of his age. His name was Christopher Marlowe, he wrote seven plays, and died aged 29. William Shakespeare was born the same year, also educated at his local grammar, wrote 37 plays, and became the greatest playwright of all. More...
In 1889, when Friedrich Nietzsche suffered the mental collapse that ended his career, he was virtually unknown. Yet by the time of his death in 1900 at the age of 55, he had become the philosophical celebrity of his age. From Russia to America, admirers echoed his estimation of himself as a titanic figure who could alter the course of history: “I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far; this does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.” His origins were humble for the role. The son of a small-town Lutheran minister, he steeped himself in classical literature while growing up in eastern Germany. When he was 24, he secured a professorship in Basel, Switzerland, and a few years later published his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy.” Against the common view of the ancient Greeks as the epitome of serene equipoise, Nietzsche emphasized the “Dionysian” excess and frenzy that complemented the “Apollonian” virtues of clarity and repose. The book’s success was limited, and its author was mocked by one leading classicist as an atavist run amok who should “gather tigers and panthers about his knees, but not the youth of Germany.” More...
Since the mid-1960s John Brockman has been at the cutting edge of ideas. He is a passionate advocate of both science and the arts, and his website Edge is a salon for the world's finest minds. More...
During World War II, the German occupation government placed select aspects of the Dutch economy, including radio and film production, under the close supervision of Berlin. The most expensive movie the Nazis made in the Dutch studios was a biopic, titled "Rembrandt" (1942), featuring a script personally approved by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The great 17th-century artist falls prey to a conspiracy of Jewish moneylenders, who deprive him of his home, his reputation and his life's work—a scenario with no basis in the historical record. More...
Few scientists die secure in the knowledge that their greatest discoveries will outlive them, but some of those who missed out make you wince. Gregor Mendel and Johann Friedrich Miescher discovered, respectively, genes and DNA in the 1860s, yet both died obscure and unappreciated. Alfred Wegener’s fundamental theory of plate tectonics drew scorn until the 1950s — two decades after he died. Last year, the biologist Ralph M. Steinman died just three days before winning a Nobel Prize. More...
