George Anastaplo and Leo de Alvarez

The Anastaplo Lecture Plutarch’s Lives: On the Decline, Fall, and Attempted Restoration of Republics Leo Paul S. de Alvarez, Professor, Politics Department, the University of Dallas Sunday, November 13, 2011

Homer Inc.

At the beginning of January, in the bookshop of Terminal 2 at San Francisco airport, I looked for a translation of the Iliad – not that I really expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank [...]

New approach to defend the value of the humanities | Inside Higher Ed

“When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting.” With those succinct words in a June 2010 op ed, New York Times columnist David Brooks summed up the conventional wisdom on the current crisis of the humanities. In an age when a higher education is increasingly about moving quickly through a curriculum streamlined to prepare [...]

Oriental Institute exhibit shows seeing isn’t always believing | UChicago News

The way people think about life in the ancient Middle East is largely based on the pictures, paintings and images they see in books and museums. But in many cases, the preconceptions or limited knowledge of the people creating the images may result in representations that may be more illusionary than real, shows a new [...]

Montaigne and the Art of Cooperation

Economic insecurity has rendered our social life brutally simple: ‘us-against-them’ coupled with ‘you-are-on-your-own’. But the French essayist can inspire radical new forms of cooperation. At the end of his life, the philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) inserted a question into an essay written many years before: “When I am playing with my cat, how do [...]

Dickens v. Lawyers

By Joseph Tartakovsky One form of wickedness Charles Dickens decried still haunts us, proud and unrepentant: the lawyer. TUESDAY is the bicentenary of the birth, in Portsmouth, England, of Charles Dickens, literature’s greatest humanist. We can rejoice that so many of the evils he assailed with his beautiful, ferocious quill — dismal debtors’ prisons, barefoot [...]

Inside Intelligence: Susan Cain’s ‘Quiet’ Argues for the Power of Introverts

My neighbor, a leadership development consultant who regularly helps people improve themselves through personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, once told me I was the most introverted person he’d ever met. I took this as a compliment. Who wouldn’t? They and others view their tendency toward solitary activity, quiet reflection and reserve as “a [...]

Nazi Family Values

The title of this article is not without irony. Some readers might think of Springtime for Hitler, the intentionally absurd and preposterous Broadway musical at the heart of the classic film by Mel Brooks, The Producers. However, the words are also meant in their most literal sense. Among Nazi memorabilia there exist albums of photographs [...]

Their Noonday Demons, and Ours

Like early medieval monks, we too are prone to the ills that come with solitary, sedentary, cerebral work. By some miracle, you set aside a day to tackle that project you can’t seem to finish in the office. You close the door, boot up your laptop, open the right file and . . . five [...]

Mulberry Child in Chicago

Mulberry Child is coming to Chicago in January and will be shown at the Gene Siskel Center as part of the documentary series. The screening schedule is Saturday, Jan. 21 at 8 pm, Tuesday, Jan. 24 at 8: 15 pm, and Thursday, Jan. 26 at 8 pm. Mulberry Child was selected as an official selection film [...]

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