Humanities fed the soul in communist Romania: how the study of the humanities kept people alive, and allowed them to find truth when surrounded by falsehood. From the article: When I heard this story, I understood that the stereotype of the fluffy, useless liberal arts was a lie. If the study of literature or history [...]
Freedom of thought in twelfth-century Paris: how Latin learning (and love) left us a legacy of creative inquiry A good man asked the doctors of [twelfth-century] Paris if it were better to learn what one did not know or to apply what one knew, and when they approved the second, concluded upon them that they [...]
Lunar travels, earthly travails: from our fictional science correspondent. What different choices will our technology offer us? I recently traveled to the moon to get a better view of things. Not with Space-X or Virgin Lunar or other such transport, but by a method I cannot specify. What I mean is I cannot explain it [...]
The Humanities Code: how literature helps to write software. The author talks about the creative process required to compose ideas in all languages, including the technological. From the article: I’ve worked in software for years and, time and again, I’ve seen someone apply the arts to solve a problem of systems. The reason for this [...]
Triumph of the Advocates: a vision for this world, or the next. Lapidus. Hey you, Lepus! What are you doing there, sitting around? Are you stargazing? Lepus. Lapidus, what’s wrong? You look distressed. Lapidus. I’m tired, that is all. Perhaps that is the reason for my distress. I just dreamt the most amazing dream, a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Thoughts of Frederick Douglass on finding the trajectory of moral and social justice in the course of history. There is, in the world's government, a force which has in all ages been recognized, sometimes as Nemesis, sometimes as the judgment of God and sometimes as retributive justice; but under whatever name, all history attests the [...]
