Posts by author
Graham Todd
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The Great Gig in the Sky
“Our universe may exist inside a black hole,” says Inside Science Minds guest columnist, Nikodem Poplawski. According to Poplawski, the theoretical physics behind the assumption of our existing inside of a black hole would help to explain many unsolved questions…
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Cat Lady Covets Kafka
Franz Kafka, who died in 1924, wanted his remaining and largely unpublished literary works to be burned after his death, but in a turn of Kafkaesque events the manuscripts trickled down through time and eventually ended up in Eva Hoffe’s…
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Walt Turns 193
Walt Whitman’s birthday was yesterday. Happy belated! Melville House pieced together pictures of Whitman’s notebooks and some of his best “come-hither” glamour shots, all taken from Library of Congress’s massive collection and The Walt Whitman Archive. There’s even a wax…
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Economists Set Phasers on Stun
Nobel prize winning economist and NYT‘s columnist, Paul Krugman expresses his love for sci-fi and fantasy in an interview for Wired magazine. Krugman cites Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation as his inspiration for becoming an economist, a damned responsible one at…
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“I Am Greatly Troubled By What You Say”
In a Letter of Note from earlier this week, Mark Twain replies to a librarian’s note concerning the Brooklyn Public Library ban on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in his characteristically wry and confounding way. After the library found copies…
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The Hemingway Papers
The Toronto Star‘s well-designed archive of Ernest Hemingway’s newspaper articles for the Canadian paper provides access to evidence of the young author honing his spartan style and exploring his favorite themes. One such exceedingly-Hemingway gem is from an article about…
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“I Was There”
William Dereseiwicz’s luminous response to Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre recently printed by the Library of America, is a critique as much as it is hero-worship. Dereseiwicz confronts Vonnegut’s novels from his earliest to his last, focusing on Vonnegut’s zenith in moral seriousness and…
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Moog on Moog
Google recently commemorated the 78th birthday of electronic music pioneer, Dr. Robert Moog, with a doodle of Moog’s most famous invention, the synthesizer. In an interview with the LA Times from 1981 archived in Rock’s Backpages, Moog recounts the unexpected…
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Thank That Fungi!
Some undergrads from Yale recently found a fungi that eats plastic while on an expedition in the Amazon designed to introduce students to discovery-based research. This super fungi can survive on polyurethane alone and even in oxygen-free environments, making it…
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Worst. Water Bed. Ever.
The Animal Kingdom, specifically the marine insect known as the water skater, has devised a new use for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, using the expanse of pelagic plastics as a space to lay its eggs. The Patch, now 100…
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Ye Olde Fart Jokes
Meanwhile in England, a troupe of 24 modern day pilgrims re-enacted Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, walking the 1637 pilgrimage route and raising money for the National Literacy Trust. The group stopped at the landmarks mentioned in the tale and each pilgrim…
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Not Vampires. Nor Werewolves. Not Even Zombies.
Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise about demon possession, chainsaws, and the Book of the Dead first debuted in 1983 as low-budget horror gold. Shortly, after it began to gather a cult following and spawned video games, comic books, and musicals.…