Read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: The First Sci-Fi Novel Written By a Woman (1666)

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For a vari­ety of rea­sons, sci­ence fic­tion has long been regard­ed as a most­ly male-ori­ent­ed realm of lit­er­a­ture. This is evi­denced, in part, by the eager­ness to cel­e­brate par­tic­u­lar works of sci-fi writ­ten by women, like Ursu­la K. LeGuin’s Earth­sea saga, Octavia But­ler’s Para­ble nov­els, Joan­na Russ’ The Female Man, or…

The Cardboard Bernini: An Artist Spends 4 Years Building a Giant Cardboard Fountain Inspired by the Baroque Sculptor Bernini, Only to Let It Dissolve in the Rain

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From the Tri­ton Foun­tain in the Piaz­za Bar­beri­ni to the Foun­tain of the Four Rivers in Piaz­za Navona, sculp­tor Gian Loren­zo Berni­ni’s glo­ri­ous pub­lic foun­tains have impressed vis­i­tors to Rome for cen­turies.

Berni­ni angled for immoral­i­ty when carv­ing his Baroque mas­ter­pieces from mar­ble.

Image by Trdinfl, via Wiki­me­dia…

Free Download: A Knitting Pattern for a Sweater Depicting an Iconic Cover of George Orwell’s 1984

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It’s win­ter, and we still have a ways to go. So maybe we could inter­est you in a free knit­ting pat­tern that depicts a vin­tage Pen­guin Clas­sics cov­er of George Orwell’s <i>1984</i>. A col­lege stu­dent gave it a go and post­ed the results on Red­dit. It’s pret­ty swelle­gant. You can

Music Producer Steve Albini, Director Godfrey Reggio & Actor Fred Armisen Explain Why Creating Is Crucial to Human Existence

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Imag­ine, if you will, an evening’s enter­tain­ment con­sist­ing of an episode of Port­landia, a spin of Nir­vana’s In Utero, and a screen­ing of Koy­aanisqat­si. Per­haps these works would, at first glance, seem to have lit­tle in com­mon. But if you end the night by watch­ing the above episode of Big Think’s series Dis­patch­es from…

Before ChatGPT, There Was ELIZA: Watch the 1960s Chatbot in Action

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In 1966, the soci­ol­o­gist and crit­ic Philip Rieff pub­lished The Tri­umph of the Ther­a­peu­tic, which diag­nosed how thor­ough­ly the cul­ture of psy­chother­a­py had come to influ­ence ways of life and thought in the mod­ern West. That same year, in the jour­nal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions of the Asso­ci­a­tion for Com­put­ing Machin­ery, the com­put­er sci­en­tist Joseph Weizen­baum…