One of the most idiosyncratic and charismatic musicians of the twentieth century, pianist Glenn Gould (1932 82) slouched at the piano from a sawed-down wooden stool, interpreting Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart at hastened tempos with pristine clarity. A strange genius and true eccentric, Gould was renowned not only for his musical gifts but also for his erratic behavior: he often hummed aloud during concerts and appeared in unpressed tails, fingerless gloves, and fur coats. In 1964, at the height of his controversial career, he abandoned the stage completely to focus instead on recording and...

Odysseus, the 13th of his group of companions, is the only one to have escaped the devouring appetite of the Cyclops Polyphemus.
The ill-fated Apollo 13 mission was launched on April 11, 1970, at 1313 hours Central Time from Pad 39 (13 x 3), and had to be aborted on April 13 after the explosion of an oxygen tank serving the commanding ship. Three of the sleeping periods scheduled for the astronauts were supposed to start 13 minutes past the hour, as was one of the possible splashdown times.
There are said to be 13 stages of Buddhahood consisting of ten bohisattva stages and three...

Published in its entirety for the first time, a candid conversation with Susan Sontag at the height of her brilliant career

-One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment . . . and I don't believe it's true. . . . I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking.-

Susan Sontag, one of the most internationally renowned and controversial intellectuals of the...