The Mystery of How a Samurai Ended up in 17th Century Venice

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It would­n’t sur­prise us to come across a Japan­ese per­son in Venice. Indeed, giv­en the glob­al touris­tic appeal of the place, we could hard­ly imag­ine a day there with­out a vis­i­tor from the Land of the Ris­ing Sun. But things were dif­fer­ent in 1873, just five years after the end of the sakoku pol­i­cy that all…

J. R. R. Tolkien Admitted to Disliking Dune “With Some Intensity” (1966)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw_GaeJnoSI

One can eas­i­ly imag­ine a read­er enjoy­ing both The Lord of the Rings and Dune. Both of those works of epic fan­ta­sy were pub­lished in the form of a series of long nov­els begin­ning in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry; both cre­ate elab­o­rate worlds of their own, right down to details of ecol­o­gy and…

Brian Eno’s Book & Music Recommendations

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If you’re a reg­u­lar lis­ten­er, you know that Ezra Klein wraps up his pod­cast inter­views with a famil­iar ques­tion: what three books would you rec­om­mend to the audi­ence? When Klein inter­viewed Bri­an Eno in Octo­ber, the pro­duc­er had these three books to offer.

First up was Print­ing and the Mind of Man,…

How Far Back in History Can You Start to Understand English?

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It’s easy to imag­ine the myr­i­ad dif­fi­cul­ties with which you’d be faced if you were sud­den­ly trans­port­ed a mil­len­ni­um back in time. But if you’re a native (or even pro­fi­cient) Eng­lish speak­er in an Eng­lish-speak­ing part of the world, the lan­guage, at least, sure­ly would­n’t be a prob­lem. Or so you’d think, until your first…

How to Jumpstart Your Creative Process with William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique

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The inner crit­ic cre­ates writer’s block and sti­fles adven­tur­ous writ­ing, hems it in with safe clichés and over­think­ing. Every writer has to find his or her own way to get free of that sour­puss ratio­nal­ist who insists on stran­gling each thought with log­i­cal analy­sis and fit­ting each idea into an oppres­sive pre­de­ter­mined scheme or ide­ol­o­gy.…