Stoicism may be having a renaissance. For centuries, the ancient philosophy that originated in Greece and spread across the Roman Empire was more or less treated as extinct ' with the word 'stoic' hanging on as shorthand for someone unemotional. But today, with the help of the internet, it's gaining ground: One of the biggest online communities, The Daily Stoic, claims to have an email following of over 750,000 subscribers. Perhaps it's not so surprising. The United States' current political climate has parallels to the last few centuries B.C. in ancient Rome, home of notable Stoics like the the philosopher Epictetus, a former slave, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. During this period of instability, including the fall of the Roman Republic, Stoicism helped its practitioners find community, meaning and tranquility. Today, too, society faces widespread feelings of isolation, depression and anxiety. Meanwhile, more and more people are looking for answers outside of mainstream religion. According to a 2022 Gallup Poll, 21% of Americans now say they have no religious affiliation....

If you went to high school in the United States anytime since the 1960s, you were likely assigned some of the following books: Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet,' 'Julius Caesar' and 'Macbeth'; John Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men'; F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby'; Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird'; and William Golding's 'The Lord of the Flies.' For many former students, these books and other so-called 'classics' represent high school English. But despite the efforts of reformers, both past and present, the most frequently assigned titles have never represented America's diverse student body. Why did these books become classics in the U.S.' How have they withstood challenges to their status' And will they continue to dominate high school reading lists' Or will they be replaced by a different set of books that will become classics for students in the 21st century' The high school canon has been shaped by many factors. Shakespeare's plays, especially 'Macbeth' and 'Julius Caesar,' have been taught consistently since the beginning of the 20th century, when the curriculum was determined by college entrance requirements. Others, like 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, were ushered into the classroom by current events ' in the case of Lee's book, the civil rights movement. Some books just seem especially suited for classroom teaching: 'Of Mice and Men' has a straightforward plot, easily identifiable themes and is under 100 pages long....

People often put national boundaries around the written word. If you read French poetry or Victorian novels, it is tempting to understand those texts strictly in relation to the history and culture of France or Britain. Yet it often helps to take a wider view about literary production. Consider that for many centuries, Chinese provided a common language of literary elites in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Into the 19th century, writers across East Asia were producing their work specifically in classical Chinese, an ancient form of writing in which each character denotes a word, not a sound. Then, with the global tide of modern nationalism, many of those older works became marginalized in the public sphere. But in recent years, that trend has begun changing, according to Wiebke Denecke, a professor in MIT's literature program, and an expert on premodern East Asia. More scholars are again diving into older works written in classical Chinese. Certainly, if Denecke has anything to do with it, that paradigm change will continue. Her work analyzes these older periods of East Asian history ' largely from 1200 B.C.E. to 1200 C.E. ' and is highly comparative in nature. Denecke has published two books, many scholarly articles, edited numerous volumes, and has worked vigorously as an editor to anthologize the classical literature of East Asia, making it more readily accessible for many readers....

Patience is wearing thin. Not only are we all bone-weary of the pandemic; rising hopes have made the current precarious state of confusion and fear, vigorous variants and stubborn vaccine rejection all the more frustrating. We thought we were almost out of the woods, but there’s no clear end in sight to this forest. And there’s no shortage of other bad and worsening news too, notably the dramatic daily evidence of the catastrophic results of climate change. The same ways human beings always have adapted – grudgingly or stoically, fearfully or fatalistically or frantically. We’re in a prolonged period of maddeningly, scarily bad news – and if we follow the 24-hour news cycle, we’re in it up to our chins. But how good has the news ever been? Precisely when or what was the Golden Age? Poet Randall Jarrell wrote, with tongue in cheek, that it’s when people went around complaining how yellow everything looked. The Homeric epics, which date from the eighth century B.C., are preoccupied with both grief and survival. Late in the Iliad, speaking of Achilles’ inconsolable grief after the loss of his beloved Patroklos, who was not a blood relative, the god Apollo reminds the other Olympians that things could always be worse:...