By: Matthew Battles

They’ve always been with us

By: Matthew Battles

CB2 has one job: to win your heart. With its silicone skin, its bark-like cooing calls, and its lurching, needy gestures, the robot stimulates people to reach out in caring supplication, just as evolution has […]

By: Matthew Battles

Much contemporary art prides itself on posing questions. But too often the questions are rehearsed, and the answers prompt only tepid flickers of sensation. Works that engage the imagination in a total fashion — that […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“Once I was an alchemist named Alec, of Holland”

By: Matthew Battles

Harry Houdini was not only the storied illusionist of memory; in his time he was famous as a debunker of mediums and psychics and as a prolific author as well. In his book The Miracle-Mongers […]