Irina Ruvinsky – Proust Questionnaire

What is your greatest fear? Forgetting my past What is your greatest extravagance? Teas from Harney & Sons What do you consider your greatest achievement? Surviving a MOSSAD-style 7 day hiking trip in Israel What do you most value in your friends? Reciprocity What is the quality you most like in a man? Irony What [...]

Original Sin on Wall Street – The Atlantic

John C. Bogle is a huge fan of the Classics. Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Group mutual fund company, is one of the dozen or so “Wall Street Elders” (as a New York Times article called them) who have backed Paul Volcker’s proposal to re-regulate the financial industry, even as their younger peers have [...]

Reports from Hell

The damned make for interesting reading, and the underworld has occasioned remarkable travelogues whose vividness has impressed itself deeply into our imagination. This course is an opportunity to compare famous accounts from the two traditions that shaped Western civilization as we know it: Athens and Jerusalem. How are these traditions related, and how do they [...]

Orlando Does Not Fade: Revisiting Tilda Swinton’s legendary “nonperformance”

When Sally Potter’s free-wheeling Orlando came to the Sundance film festival in 1993, it didn’t exactly fit the profile of a festival breakout. It wasn’t a regional character drama like Gas Food Lodging or Mississippi Masala. It wasn’t handmade and idiosyncratic like sex, lies, and videotape or Slacker. It wasn’t a blood-spattered action picture, like [...]

Tolstoy & Co. as Objects of Obsession

Early in Elif Batuman’s funny and melancholy first book, The Possessed, she describes her disillusionment, as a would-be novelist, with “the transcendentalist New England culture of ‘creative writing.’ ” The problem with creative writing programs, she says, is their obsession with craft. “What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or [...]

Bhagavad Gita as Management Tool

The Delhi Metro is scrupulously clean, impeccably maintained and almost unfailingly punctual. Much of the credit for its success is usually laid at the feet of one man, Elattuvalapil Sreedharan, a 77-year-old technocrat who serves as the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation’s managing director. Mr. Sreedharan has a reputation for fearlessness and incorruptibility. At the Metro [...]

Hard-boiled: Classics of American Crime Fiction

Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Nick Charles: these are our “hard-boiled” American detectives — heavy-drinking, no-nonsense loners with a soft spot for dames. Raymond Chandler criticized British murder mysteries for lack of realism, praising Dashiell Hammett for “giving murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”  [...]

Spring and Summer 2010 list of courses

Here are the upcoming Humanities, Arts, and Sciences course offerings for Spring and Summer 2010, listed by start month. The courses will be listed on the Graham School website February 25, 2010. Here is the list in pdf format. March Advanced Colloquial Arabic Al-Ghazali: The Alchemy of Islamic Thought American Masters Asian Classics: The China [...]

Spinning Caesar’s murder

The murder of Julius Caesar was a messy business. As with all assassinations, it was easier for the conspirators to plan the first blow than to predict what would happen next – never mind to have an exit strategy in reserve, should things go wrong. Click here to read more of Mary Beard’s review of [...]