Since I was born, humans have created 6 billion jobs. All while technology relentlessly disrupts existing industries. The pin making machine replaced the hand-crafted pin. The ox-pulled plow replaced millions of hours of backbreaking work. The amplification and electronic distribution of music upended the work of the live musician, and the camera replaced countless portrait […]

The story of the Globe Theatre, the ancestral home of Shakespeare’s plays, is itself very Shakespearean, in all of the ways we use that adjective: it has deep roots in English history, a tragic backstory, and represents all of the hodgepodge of London, in the early 17th century and today, with the city’s colorful street […]

Pedestrian traffic in Grand Central Station is a bit of a miracle. Thousands of people, all walking quickly, in almost non-Euclidian chaos, headed toward different trains. And no one collides. We see the same thing at a more dangerous clip when a four lane highway merges. The cars are just a few feet apart (or […]

Inferno, Canto X: Many artists have attempted to illustrate Dante Alighieri’s epic poem the Divine Comedy, but none have made such an indelible stamp on our collective imagination as the Frenchman Gustave Doré. Doré was 23 years old in 1855, when he first decided to create a series of engravings for a deluxe edition of […]

Two hundred years ago, there were a lot of violinists. Many made a living at it. If you were of means and wanted to hear music, your best option was to hire someone to play it for you. Of course, the invention of the phonograph and the radio changed all of that. Now, one great […]