Renowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". An enthralling parable (or a cheap metaphor) of the American Dream as a beckoning finger toward a con game, a kind of virus infecting artists of...

Science has given us several explanations for how humans evolved from walking on four limbs to two feet. None, however, is as riveting as what master storyteller Ngugi wa Thiong'o offers in "The Upright Revolution". Blending myth and folklore with an...

Taking its inspiration from Walter Benjamin's seminal 1931 essay, the "Unpacking My Library" series charts a spirited exploration of the reading and book collecting practices of today's leading thinkers. "Artists and Their Books" showcases the person...

What is a hostile environment? How exactly can feelings be mixed? What on earth might it mean when someone writes that he was "happily situated" as a slave? The answers, of course, depend upon whom you ask. Science and the humanities typically offe...

N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. In "Unthought", she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinking – how we use cognitive processes that are inacc...

What is the place of individual genius in a global world of hyper-information – a world in which, as Walter Benjamin predicted more than seventy years ago, everyone is potentially an author? For poets in such a climate, "originality" begins to take a...

Who during the Renaissance could have dissented from the values of reason and restraint, patience and humility, rejection of the worldly and the physical? These widely articulated values were part of the inherited Christian tradition and were reinfor...

As words and stories are increasingly disseminated through digital means, the significance of the book as object – whether pristine collectible or battered relic – is growing as well. "Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books" spotlights the per...

What does a library say about the mind of its owner? How do books map the intellectual interests, curiosities, tastes, and personalities of their readers? What does the collecting of books have in common with the practice of architecture? "Unpacking...