Untitled (November 9, 2013 9:49AM) (detail), by Richard Misrach, 2013. Archival pigment print, 60 x 80 inches. © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.

States of Mind

Volume XI, Number 1 | winter 2018

Miscellany

In 1903, Mark Twain comforted Helen Keller, who had been accused of plagiarizing her story “The Frost King,” telling her in a letter, “All ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.” He took a harder line on his own intellectual property, however, campaigning so vigorously for stringent copyright laws that the American Bar Association later recognized him for his efforts.

What a torture to talk to filled heads that allow nothing from the outside to enter them.

—Joseph Joubert, 1807