'A word after a word after a word is power.'

'In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.'

- Isaac Asimov

'There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.'

- Writer Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

'When you're climbing Mount Everest, nothing is easy. You just take one step at a time, never look back and always keep your eyes glued to the top.'

- Author Jacqueline Susann (1918-1974)

'For it would seem—her case proved it—that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.'

- Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) in "Orlando: A Biography"

'I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.'

- American novelist Eudora Welty (1909-2001)

'Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul—and sings the tunes without the words—and never stops at all.'

- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

'The true measure of all our actions is how long the good in them lasts.'

- Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022)

'Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.'

- Author Philip Roth (1933-2018)

'The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.'

- Marine biologist and environmentalist Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

What it means to call something 'Orwellian'

The adjective often refers to anything that resembles the dystopian governments of George Orwell, usually a state like the one in "1984" that monitors its citizens to ensure compliance. But as this video essay from Noah Tavlin makes clear, the more precise definition is a society that redefines language to control thought.

'The best way to make a dream come true is to wake up.'

- Fashion icon Anna Wintour (1949 – present)

'I succeeded by saying what everyone else is thinking.'

- Comedian Joan Rivers (1933-2014)

American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

'Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.'

- Suffragist Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)

Before Dawkins, other biologists proposed the power of mutating ideas

Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod proposed, “Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”

Breaking down Anthropic's products and why their models are named after literary forms

Since March 2024, the Claude series of large language models includes three varieties—Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus—named to metaphorically illustrate increasing complexity and computing power. Claude Code can perform software engineering tasks for developers and, as of January 2026, writes nearly all of Anthropic's code alongside Opus 4.5.

Jane Austen remains a literary force 250 years later

Both her books and adaptations of them for film continue to sell, with 2025 seeing the highest book sales since 2009. Critics claim her deep, witty exploration of relationships and social norms are the basis of her enduring relevance.

Ursula K. Le Guin worked to dismantle fantasy's clichés

The author is one of the genre’s most legendary names, constructing high fantasies like “The Earthsea Cycle” that detail intricate new worlds. In 2004, she delivered a lecture criticizing books and movies that rely on a simple formula: white characters, Medieval settings, and a battle between good and evil. “Whenever I find a fantasy that is set in a genuinely imagined society and culture instead of this lazy-minded, recycled hokum,” she said, “I feel like setting off fireworks.”

David Foster Wallace's iconic commencement speech

David Foster Wallace’s remarkable 2005 commencement speech, This is Water, is a timeless trove of wisdom for living a meaningful life. Here is a full transcript along with audio.

Writer William Gibson invented the term 'cyberspace'

The science-fiction writer coined the term in his 1982 short story "Burning Chrome" to describe "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding."

Inside 'Blood Meridian' author Cormac McCarthy's library of 20,000 books

The reclusive writer published 12 novels and taught himself stonemasonry and quantum physics, among myriad other skills and subjects. Since he died in 2023, scholars have been mining his personal library for lessons on his influences, interests, and more.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

The longest word in English is 189,819 letters long

The wildly-winding word (so long that we can't fit it here) is the proper name for titin, a protein that keeps muscles elastic.

'There are only four kinds of people in the world—those who have been caregivers, those who are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.'

- Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter (1927–2023)

An ‘auteur’ is another name for the chief creative mind of a film

“Auteur” is French for author. In film studies, the word refers to a film director who is considered the principal creative mind, or author, behind a film. Directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Steven Spielberg, and Greta Gerwig are often considered auteurs.

Oxford University Press names 'rizz' its 2023 word of the year

Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has named “rizz” the 2023 word of the year. It's an abbreviation of the word "charisma," which is defined as an ability to charm or attract others. The word defeated three other words via public vote. Read more here.

Explore a feminist reading of Mary Cassatt's work

Artsy's Olivia Horn considers the American Impressionist's work from a 21st-century perspective, unpacking how her focus on women's lives was a revolutionary act for the 19th century that still resonates today.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

The power and influence of the American presidency have expanded significantly over time—far beyond what the founders envisioned.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Apeirophobia is an overwhelming fear of living forever, perhaps stemming from the brain's inability to conceptualize an infinite life.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

Electrical grids worldwide must double their power delivery capacity by 2050 to meet surging demand from AI and electric vehicles.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

The word 'jazz' evolved from 'jasm,' 19th-century American slang for 'energy'

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Read a deep dive on the 'all-purpose healing' peptide BPC-157.

A small portion of The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother,' an obscure '60s gospel record, is the basis for thousands of hip-hop tracks, making it one of the most sampled records ever that's informally known as 'the Amen break.'

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

The Dracula character, now seen as the vampire archetype, was inspired by a seafood-induced nightmare its creator experienced.

Indefinite cloning of some endangered species may not sustain their longevity because cloning success rates decrease as genetic mutations accumulate.

Explore the history, structure, and species of Australia's Great Barrier Reef with this interactive journey narrated by Sir David Attenborough.