Wise fools and foolish wits: what experience should teach us, if we would learn from it: "To learn that we have said or done a foolish thing, that is nothing: we must learn that we are fools, a far broader and more important lesson." Michel de Montaigne, "On Experience"
Computers transform our knowledge of the past. According to the author, computerized quantitative analysis offers insights that traditional historical study cannot. From the article: Huge swathes of our past are slowly but surely getting digitised as old books and scanned and organised. It stands to reason that surely once the historians get to work it [...]
Judgments about the arts: mind what you put in! Ben Jonson tells his audience how much they may assess what they see, depending on their means: It is further agreed that every person here have his or their free-will of censure, to like or dislike at their own charge, the playwright having now departed with [...]
Gambling on the meaning of nothing: how much do we really understand one another, even as friends? Minaccio, a witty man and a gambler, once lost his cash and his coat, too, playing at dice (he was truly poor), and sat weeping at the doorway of the tavern. A friend saw him distraught and in [...]
A 1535 Latin Bible, owned by Henry VIII, contains annotations from the "great" English Bible written between 1539 and 1549, and were discovered recently by Dr. Eyal Poleg, a historian at the University of London through 3-D X-Ray imaging. "The book is a unique witness to the course of Henry's Reformation. Printed in 1535 by [...]
Her sonnet meditates on human degradation, and self-degradation, in the new Iron Age. From "Epitaph on the Race of Man" Here lies, and none to mourn him but the sea, That falls incessant on the empty shore, Most various Man, cut down to spring no more; Before his prime, even in his infancy Cut down, [...]
Obsessing about STEM: America seems entranced by STEM education, at the expense of our future, which requires more agile ways of thinkings that the humanities and liberal arts provide. "The United States has led the world in economic dynamism, innovation and entrepreneurship thanks to exactly the kind of teaching we are now told to defenestrate. A [...]
Why read the classics: Italo Calvino (1923-1985) explains the nature of a classical literary composition, which has various means of speaking to us throughout the different times of our lives. If the books have remained the same (even though they too change in light of a different historical perspective), we ourselves have certainly changed, and the encounter [...]
Do we need a calendar for the season of love?
Umberto Eco explains how books, as our familial elders, deepen our emotional lives across generations. Valentino Bompiani once circulated a saying: “one person who reads is worth two.” It was said by a publisher probably as a clever slogan, but I think it means that writing (and in general language) lengthen one’s life. From the time when [...]
