In his new book, The Swerve, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of an ancient poem and a manuscript explorer, and resurrects a time when people truly loved books. Shakespeare ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover endpoints and how they relate to the cloud. Bracciolini’s ability to pull out of the ash bin of history a single Lucretius ...

Before he became a Professor of literature at Harvard, and way before he wrote his classic Shakespeare biography, Will in The World, Stephen Greenblatt was an I'll-read-anything kind of kid. One day, ...

Epicurus didn't like poetry. He thought it was unclear in comparison to prose, and in his own works used prose, often of a sparse and crabby variety. A wise man will be able to talk about poetry, ...

This week in the magazine, Stephen Greenblatt explains how Lucretius and his poem "On the Nature of Things" shaped the modern world. Here Greenblatt reads a passage from John Dryden's translation of ...

Lucretius (c. 99 B.C.-c. 55 B.C.), author of De Rerum Natura, was a Roman poet and philosopher who explained and expounded the beliefs of the Greek philosopher Epicurus—advocating a happy, tranquil ...

In 1585, the greatest Elizabethan scientist, Thomas Harriot, was sent by his patron, Sir Walter Raleigh, to the nascent English colony in Virginia to assess the natural resources, observe the ...

How do we know that we're real? How do we know that we know? Individuals with our own sets of sense organs and therefore our own sets of sensory perceptions, we can't verify every day that the wall we ...