Boris Kriger

Everything in the heavens turns. Moons wheel around planets, planets around stars, stars around the bright hubs of their galaxies, and galaxies around one another in gravitational waltzes so slow that a single step outlasts a mountain range. Rotation is the most ordinary fact in the sky. Yet by...

In 1946 a five-year-old from Queens stood under a tyrannosaur and decided, on the spot, what he would do with his life. He kept the promise for fifty-six years. What nobody could have predicted is that he would spend most of them arguing with people, cheerfully and at enormous length, in a prose...

Twenty-four centuries ago, in a windblown town on the northern coast of Greece, a man who reportedly could not stop laughing made one of the strangest and most consequential claims in the history of thought.

Under the old rule of the Sanhedrin, a man convicted by every single judge walked free. Seventy-one votes for guilt, and the court released him. The reasoning was not mercy. It was quality control.

We are told that the moral life is a matter of choices, and that a good person is someone who chooses well. Iris Murdoch spent a lifetime quietly dismantling that comfortable picture.

What is it that we do when we think? We imagine the mind as a mirror, faithfully reflecting a world that shines in through the senses. It is nothing of the kind. The mind is a fire that exists only while it burns—an activity, not a container; a verb, not a vessel.

Alan Turing broke the German naval Enigma, designed the machine you are almost certainly holding or sitting in front of, invented the test that still frames every argument about artificial intelligence, and explained why leopards have spots.

Everybody agrees that Mark Twain was funny. This is one of the very few things about which everybody agrees, which ought to make a thinking person suspicious, and this book sets out to spoil the agreement by asking a rude question: why?

For a hundred years Martin Buber has been read with bowed heads. The gentle prophet of dialogue, the bearded sage who taught a tired century to say “Thou,” he became the conscience of a people and the symbol of an age.

In 1543 a church administrator in a cold corner of Poland published a book claiming that the ground beneath our feet is in motion. Everything you have been told about what happened next is wrong. He was not persecuted. He was not mocked.

Some twenty-three centuries ago, a minor official in a doomed little state was offered the second-highest office in a great kingdom. He was fishing at the time. He did not look up.

A man moves to the forest to be left alone. The forest turns out to be fully staffed. Twenty-five years ago Boris Kriger drove north out of Toronto on a nice day, kept going until he got tired, and bought a house on a hill with six and a half acres of impassable bush.

We are taught to think of culture as a museum: a building full of finished objects, each with a little label, each waiting quietly to be admired. Yuri Lotman spent his life arguing that this picture is precisely wrong.

For nearly eighty years George Orwell has been read as a prophet, which is a comfortable way of reading him, because prophecies are always about somebody else. This book reads him instead as an experiment that has now run its full course. The results are in, and they are worse than the prophecy.

A biography of the man whose ideas are still running, on hardware he sketched and never lived to see.

Theodor Adorno spent his life doing something most of us are trained from childhood to avoid: he looked directly at the cracks.

For a hundred years the cosmological constant has been served up as physics' most embarrassing riddle.

Nine hundred years before “think for yourself” became a slogan, Pierre Abélard, known to English readers as Peter Abelard, said it out loud in a world that answered such talk with fire and the knife.

For centuries, the patent has stood as a symbol of invention—a mark of genius, a reward for creativity, a promise that innovation would be protected and shared. But behind this polished image lies a more tangled reality. Patents today are wielded less as shields and more as weapons.

Your passport is not a document of freedom. It is a leash with a government logo. The nation-state—that seventeenth-century invention built on territory, bureaucracy, and the implied threat of force—is creaking under the weight of a world it was never designed to manage.