Seneca on the Happy Life
From Seneca’s De Vita Beata (“On the Happy Life,”) I shall make whatever befalls me become a good thing, but I prefer that what befalls me should be comfortable and pleasant and unlikely to cause me annoyance: for you need not suppose that any virtue exists without labour, but some virtues need spurs, while others […]
The Catholic Church Has Turned into a Revolting Institution
After quitting the faith, The Week’s Damon Linker wonders if the Roman Catholic Church will ever survive the barrage of scandals engulfing it: Of course the history of the church is filled with imperfection, of violence, of all-too-human sin and corruption … it is to come face to face with monstrous, grotesque ugliness. It is […]
Nothing Exists or is Destroyed
American novelist and novelist Peter Matthiessen writes in The Snow Leopard (1987): Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form…the cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which […]
Mikhail’s Love for Raisa Gorbacheva
Guardian’s foreign correspondent and author Jonathan Steele writes in a profile of Mikhail Gorbachev, The death of his beloved wife, Raisa, from cancer two years ago was a terrible blow, but he picked himself up within weeks and now maintains a schedule as energetic as ever. He visits the cemetery beside the Novodevichi monastery in […]
Adam Smith on Division of Labor
In Wealth Of Nations, the Scottish economist Adam Smith offered the classic example of the pin-maker and argued that humans could ‘specialize’ their skills to create greater aggregate human prosperity: One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for […]
Can’t Concentrate in the Digital Age
Matthew Hennessey, editor at the Wall Street Journal, writes on NationalReview.com, For many of us, media—by which I mean use of any device with a screen—is the oxygen we breathe. We need it everywhere. We can’t work, play, or relax without it. ‘Digital natives,’ born and raised in the internet era, don’t even recognize it […]
The Multifaceted Jorge Luis Borges
American novelist William H. Gass writes in his essay “Imaginary Borges and His Books” in Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970): And which is Borges, which his double? … there is the Borges who plays with the notion that all our works are products of the same universal Will so that one author impersonally […]
No Formula for Dealing with Hard Things
From venture capitalist Ben Horowitz’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Every time I read a management or self-help book, I find myself saying, “That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.” The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when […]
What are Surety Bonds?
Business writer Daniel Akst notes that poet Wallace Stevens spent his career in the insurance industry as a highly successful and respected executive who specialized in surety bonds: Surety bonds are guarantees that one party will fulfill its obligations to another; if it doesn’t, the bond issuer has to pay, but can seek to recover […]
The Collapse of American Parenting
Family doctor and psychologist Leonard Sax explains what we see instead in his book, The Collapse of Parenting: In American culture today, same-age peers matter more than parents. And parents are reluctant to change the rules—to insist, for example, that time with parents and family is more important than time with same-age peers—because parents are […]