Monday Few news items have alarmed and depressed me as much as the burning of the Amazon rain forests, often called the “lungs of the world.” As National Geographic reports The Amazon rainforest—home to one in 10 species on Earth—is on fire. As of last week, 9,000 wildfires were raging simultaneously across the vast rainforest […]
Friday The other day I stumbled across an American Economist article, written up in JSTOR Daily, arguing that teachers who want their students to retain the fundamentals of game theory should turn to Greek myths. Economist James D. Miller and classicist Debbie Felton explain their reasoning as follows: For professional economists, game theory is about […]
Monday I won’t take credit for this but Washington Post’s Molly Roberts recently penned a very Better-Living-with Beowulf type column where she contrasted two Democratic presidential candidates by examining which version of the Odysseus/Ulysses story they prefer. Her piece gives me an excuse to apply other versions of the story to various 2020 contenders. Roberts […]
Tuesday My brother Sam, an enthusiastic Unitarian Universalist, gave me Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life for Christmas, and I was pleased that the author sees literature playing a major role. In today’s post I share how she draws on the ancient Greeks. Armstrong writes, “All faiths insist that compassion is the test […]
Spiritual Sunday Every time I visit Slovenia (six times now, the first two for year-long Fulbrights), I learn something new. In my most recent visit, I discovered it is common for couples to live together for years before getting married (if they ever do). While I can’t speak to overall statistics, I talked with several […]
Tuesday The other day I detected one of Atlantic’s excellent columnists misusing a classical analogy. I flag Ed Kilgore, not to show off, but because the analogy is indeed enlightening if used correctly. See if you can find the mistake: This would suggest that the occasional efforts by individual Republican congressmen to show some distance from […]
John Gatta’s “Spirits of Place” is helping me understand why I have chosen to retire in my home town. Wordsworth, Stowe, Homer, and Frost help out as well.
A new book looks at how the ancient Greeks approached the issue of anger in works such as “Iliad,” “Ajax,” and “Hecuba.
