Boris Kriger

He is the only English novelist with an adjective. Not a school, not a movement, not a period — an adjective, sitting in the dictionary, available to any journalist describing a slum, a courtroom, or a Christmas. And yet the same writer sits half-read on more shelves than any author alive or...

He drew the atom every schoolchild can still sketch from memory, and it was wrong within twelve years. He never wrote an equation that carries his name into a modern textbook. He spoke so softly that colleagues leaned across tables to catch him, and wrote so badly that a Nobel laureate once...

In the spring of 5 BCE, a comet appeared in the constellation Capricornus and remained visible for over seventy days. Chinese court astronomers recorded it in nine characters of classical Chinese. No one else wrote it down. Not the Romans. Not the Greeks. Not Josephus. Not a single astronomer in...

Kafkaesque. Everyone knows the word. Almost nobody knows the man.Franz Kafka once read the opening chapter of The Trial aloud to his friends and laughed so hard he had to stop. Almost nothing in the popular image of him survives contact with that fact. The gloomy saint of alienation was a...

We spend a great deal of energy pretending to be certain. We sign our names to opinions we have not examined, defend convictions we inherited rather than chose, and treat the absence of doubt as though it were the same thing as the presence of truth. Bertrand Russell spent a long, turbulent, and...

In 1889 a broke ex-actor sat down to write a serious history of the River Thames. He meant to cover the abbeys, the charters, the battles, and the kings. His editor cut all of it. What survived was a book about three incompetent men, a fictional dog, a tin of pineapple that could not be opened...

Bernhard Riemann published nine papers. Nine, in twenty years of working life, one of them eight pages long. He was too shy to speak in public, too poor to keep two rooms warm, and far too scrupulous to let anything leave his desk before he judged it finished. Then he died at thirty-nine on the...

For half a century, readers have been told that Jorge Luis Borges was the great dissolver, the writer who proved that reality is only language and that behind every word waits nothing but another word. This book argues the opposite. Borges was not the man who erased the world. He was its...

In 1954, in a shared suite at the Princeton Graduate College, a graduate student with a taste for sherry and science fiction started teasing two friends about the absurd things they had just said regarding quantum mechanics. Three years later he had a doctorate, a published paper, and a theory...

A young man is sentenced to death for an elbow. He is not frightened, and that is the thing nobody can forgive him. His mother comes to the visiting room and makes him take off his cap. His lawyer, who has spent twenty-one years being a professional and has lately begun to think he would rather...

Nietzsche said: push the falling. A plush bear says: sit down. Have some tea. Boris Kriger—former priest, systems theorist, and the man who may have solved the universe with one formula and zero free parameters—has spent twenty years arguing with a dead philosopher at his kitchen table.

Nobody wanted him. The mathematicians thought he drew too many pictures. The economists thought he was a mathematician. The physicists thought he was an economist, and the geographers were not entirely sure he was allowed in the building. So Benoit Mandelbrot spent thirty-five years at a...

In the spring of 1794 the French Republic cut off the head of a tax collector. It happened to be the same head that had worked out what burning is, what breathing is, what water is made of, and what an element could honestly be said to be. This is usually told as an irony. It is not an irony. It...

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who spent forty years saying difficult things on purpose.

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. He was prosecuted for being who he was, given hormone...

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. He asked the messengers whether they had heard of a certain sacred tortoise, three thousand years dead, whose shell...

He gave the world its motor and then spent forty years insisting the electron did not exist.Nikola Tesla was raised to be a priest. Cholera released him from the promise at sixteen, and by twenty-six he had seen a magnetic field turn in his head and had handed the twentieth century the machine...

The universe was perfectly content until someone arrived and began to ask why. Stars burned, rivers ran, and matter rearranged itself without complaint—until consciousness appeared and demanded an explanation that was never going to come. From that single, fateful encounter, the absurd was...

We have spent sixty years repeating Hannah Arendt’s most famous phrase without noticing that she may have left it half-finished. Evil, she found at the trial of a tidy bureaucrat, was not monstrous but banal. This book takes the sentence and turns it over. What if banality is not a quality...

This book is not here to comfort you. It does not promise hope, progress, or some tender reassurance about the nobility of the human project. It will not tell you that everything happens for a reason, or that there is meaning to be found in our collective struggle.