Interviews

Infinite Genius: Amir Aczel Adds Up Georg Cantor's "Novel and Powerful" Methods of Proof
Infinite Genius: Amir Aczel Adds Up Georg Cantor's "Novel and Powerful" Methods of Proof
In the winter of 1884, Georg Cantor suffered his first complete mental breakdown. He was thirty-nine years old and had spent the previous decade constructing one of the most radical... Read more...
Allen Josephs
¡Ole! Allen Josephs Says Ernest Hemingway's Bond to Spain Was No Bull
In the summer of 1925, a group of American and British expatriates traveled from Paris to Pamplona for the Festival of San Fermín. They drank heavily, watched bullfights, and fell... Read more...
Mutation Versus Natural Selection: Masatoshi Nei Challenges Charles Darwin's Evolution Theory
Mutation Versus Natural Selection: Masatoshi Nei Challenges Charles Darwin's Evolution Theory
The summer Charles Darwin spent on the Galapagos Islands in 1835 lasted just five weeks. He was 26, seasick for much of the voyage, and not yet sure what he... Read more...
Daniele Moyal-Sharrock
“Revolutionary Insight”: Daniele Moyal-Sharrock Explains Why ‘On Certainty’ is Ludwig Wittgenstein's “Neglected Masterpiece”
In the spring of 1951, Ludwig Wittgenstein lay dying of prostate cancer in his doctor's house in Cambridge. He had spent the final months of his life doing what he... Read more...
Helge Kragh
In A Class of His Own: Helge Kragh on How Paul Dirac “Changed the Course of Fundamental Physics”
In 1928, Paul Dirac sat alone in his rooms at Cambridge and wrote down an equation. He was twenty-five years old and had set himself a problem that had defeated... Read more...
Peter J. Bowler
Beyond A Bug's Life: Peter J. Bowler on How Charles Darwin's Theory "Evolved" Over Time
On the morning of June 18, 1858, Charles Darwin opened a letter from a naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace and felt the ground shift beneath him. Wallace, working independently in... Read more...
In James Joyce's Wake: Margot Norris on The Irish Writer's "Play with Narration and Language"
In James Joyce's Wake: Margot Norris on The Irish Writer's "Play with Narration and Language"
In 1922, shortly after the publication of Ulysses, customs officials in the United States were still seizing and burning copies of the novel as obscene material. One bewildered reader reportedly... Read more...
California Dreaming: Jay Parini Explains How John Steinbeck's West Coast Roots Influenced His Writing
California Dreaming: Jay Parini Explains How John Steinbeck's West Coast Roots Influenced His Writing
In the spring of 1938, John Steinbeck drove into the migrant labor camps of California's San Joaquin Valley and saw something that made him so furious he could barely hold... Read more...
A Man of His Times: Jonathan Sperber Explains Why Karl Marx's Ideas Are History
A Man of His Times: Jonathan Sperber Explains Why Karl Marx's Ideas Are History
On the afternoon of March 17, 1883, eleven people gathered in a small cemetery in Highgate, London, to bury Karl Marx. There was no state funeral, no public procession, no... Read more...
Henry Allison
Transcendental Idealism: Henry Allison on “Complexities” of Immanuel Kant's Philosophy
In the winter of 1787, Immanuel Kant sat down to revise the most important book he had ever written. The first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, published six years... Read more...
Roy Foster: W. B. Yeats' Poetic Voice “Uses Tradition and Modernity”
Roy Foster: W. B. Yeats' Poetic Voice “Uses Tradition and Modernity”
Few poets have managed to bind together the weight of tradition and the daring of modernity as seamlessly as W. B. Yeats. Born in Dublin in 1865, Yeats emerged as... Read more...
Peter Lax
"The Most Powerful Brain": Peter Lax on the Life and Genius of John von Neumann
It is rare in any century for a single mind to redefine the landscape of multiple disciplines, yet John von Neumann managed precisely that. A mathematician of breathtaking range, he... Read more...