Fifteen years ago, David Foster Wallace died at a tragically young age. He was one of the most brilliant writers of his generation, but he now faces renewed criticism over his treatment of women, in his life and his books.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Literature
Over the years, we did several interviews with Wallace himself. The last was in 2004, about his collection of short stories — "Oblivion." It’s an interview that’s been collected in two Wallace anthologies.
David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece — "Infinite Jest" — is famously difficult to read. Colleen Leahy and Makini Allwood climbed the literary mountain of a book, and they share their experience on a podcast called "And But So."
There are the female scientists you can name, and the ones forgotten by history. Like Mileva Marić-Einstein. She might just have been more brilliant than Albert was — but we'll never know.
Machines are getting smarter. They have been for a long time. But is there anything uniquely human that they will never be able to do, like make art?
For years, David Roberts climbed some of Alaska’s biggest mountains, and made a number of first ascents. His new book is an examination of why some climbers feel compelled to push the edge of what’s possible.
We decided to trace Western culture's fixation on guilt back to one of its earliest origins — the story of Adam and Eve. It's only a page and a half in the Bible, but literary historian Stephen Greenblatt told Steve Paulson why it has been so influential.
It's common in literary and historical accounts of powerful women to make them out to be villains — witches, demons, succubi, changelings — or erase them entirely. Historian Kara Cooney, author Madeline Miller, Religious scholar Serenity Young, and classics scholar Emily Wilson talk about why that might be.
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