An Introduction to Aleister Crowley, History’s Most Infamous Occultist

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“Do what thou wilt”: as the cen­tral prin­ci­ple of a world­view, it may not sound like much, but at least there are always a great many peo­ple ready and will­ing to hear it. So dis­cov­ered Aleis­ter Crow­ley, the ear­ly twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Occultist now remem­bered not just for his uncon­ven­tion­al reli­gious prac­tices, but also for his…

Man as Industrial Palace: Watch an Animation of the Famous 1926 Lithograph That Depicts the Human Body as a Modern Factory

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In 1926, Fritz Kahn, a Ger­man gyne­col­o­gist and anato­my text­book author, pro­duced a lith­o­graph called Der Men­sch als Indus­triepalast (Man as Indus­tri­al Palace) that depict­ed the human body as a fac­to­ry, a chem­i­cal plant of sorts. Kah­n’s body came com­plete with mechan­i­cal lungs, a rock-sort­ing stom­ach, gears for a throat, and a switch­board…

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014

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Image by Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When New York City host­ed The World’s Fair in 1964, Isaac Asi­mov, the pro­lif­ic sci-fi author and pro­fes­sor of bio­chem­istry at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to won­der what the world would look like 50 years hence — assum­ing the world sur­vived the nuclear threats…

Tom Lehrer, RIP: Hear All of His Witty, Satirical Songs in One Playlist

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Tom Lehrer died last week­end, more than four decades after rumors of his death had first gone into cir­cu­la­tion. He did­n’t both­er to con­tra­dict them, pub­licly claim­ing that he fig­ured they would “cut down on the junk mail.” That quip proved not just that he was still alive, but that his wit was…

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Syllabus Asked Students to Read 32 Great Literary Works, Totaling 6,000 Pages

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Whether willed, invol­un­tary, or a mix of both, the declin­ing lit­er­a­cy of col­lege stu­dents is by now so often lament­ed that reports of it should no longer come as a sur­prise. And yet, on some lev­el, they still do: Eng­lish majors in region­al Kansas uni­ver­si­ties find the open­ing to Bleak House vir­tu­al­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble; even…