By: Patrick Cates

In the Orwellian year of 1984, my father took me to the Centre Pompidou and exposed my 10-year-old sponge of a brain to its first contemporary art collection and, therein, to a towering agglomeration of […]

By: Lucy Sante

If CHESTER HIMES (1909-84) hadn’t found himself broke in France in the mid-1950s he might today be remembered only as the author of some acute, painful treatments of racism and prison life — the kind […]

By: Tor Aarestad

A self-described “physicist turned historian for philosophical purposes,” THOMAS KUHN (1922-96) was largely an autodidact in his eventual home — the then-new field of the history of science. With his scattershot academic background, it seems […]

By: David Smay

Moving from Shanghai to Hong Kong at age five, WONG KAR-WAI (born 1958) learned to speak Cantonese at the movies. He hustled his way into the Hong Kong film boom of the ’80s, screenwriting hackwork […]

By: Matthew Battles

The falling out of Wikipedia founders Jimmy Wales and LARRY SANGER (born 1968) has become the stuff of legend — or an endless cycle of flames and manifestos, which is the form legend takes in […]

By: Joshua Glenn

In the rumpus room of midcentury intellectual culture, WALTER BENJAMIN (1892-1940) is everybody’s favorite overstuffed velveteen rabbit. Susan Sontag, for example, rationalized Benjamin’s many self-defeating habits: the glacial pace at which he worked, she wrote, […]

By: Tom Nealon

Before NORTHROP FRYE (1912-91) there was no Literary Theory, only criticism. He blasted a place for the former, as a distinct field of study — first with Fearful Symmetry (1947) and then decisively with Anatomy […]

By: Patrick Cates

L D2 L′ F′ D2 F. U R L U2 R′ L′. F D2 F′ D′ F D F′. Anybody who has ever experienced apoplectic rage while trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube, and has […]

By: Peggy Nelson

A New England scion twice kicked out of Harvard for nonconformity and “apathy,” R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER (1895-1983) went on to invent the geodesic dome (he said he got the idea while watching the bubbles generated […]

By: Erik Davis

Smith explored the inner landscapes opened up by postwar mind science.

By: Lynn Peril

Clad in a leather jumpsuit, tiny waist offset by enormous bosom, her performance in Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) transformed what could have been a run-of-the-mill B-movie into a parable of female power […]

By: James Parker

The castle of consciousness, turret and coign, too huge for the human head, where stalk the battlements, robed and forbidding, the super-intelligent dead, has terrible deeps and horrible heights, and walls that are wondrous thick, […]

By: Douglas Wolk

For a good chunk of the 1940s, the R&B chart (or the “race records” chart, as Billboard called it then) might just as well have been called the LOUIS JORDAN (1908-75) chart: he scored hit […]

By: Jason Grote

The biography of ROBERT A. HEINLEIN (1907-88) firmly places Golden-Age SF on the grand continuum of Americana: the no-nonsense engineer’s mentality of his Kansas City upbringing, his longing for military service (he graduated from the […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Kurt Weill settled into a successful Broadway career after escaping Nazi Germany, but the American soujourn of Brecht’s other major Weimar-era musical collaborator did not end so fortunately. HANNS EISLER (1898-1962) set his Schoenberg-trained hand […]