Soon it will be Labor Day once again, the day on which we in the United States celebrate the value of labor by not laboring. Occasionally, however, my…
At first, it seems like a commonplace observation: stories, whether oral or written, do not exist independently, but only in relation to a teller and an…
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Perhaps I should have a trigger warning for the youthful members of my audience: this is a newsletter about old age, specifically about continuing to be…
When you teach an Introduction to Literature or Introduction to Creative Writing class, your first task is to confront students with a challenging fact…
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I want to write about peace, which means not only writing about its absence but about the fact that a good number of people deny that it is a possible…
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I have always been struck by a repeated assertion of one of my heroes, humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, about those people he called…
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Last year, 2021, was the celebration of the 700th birthday of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I am, admittedly, a bit late to the party—ironically, as I have…
A great deal of excitement has been stirred up by the release in November of a new form of artificial intelligence, or AI. In addition to being an…
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What is the use of nostalgia, this yearning over the vanished past, this clinging to what is gone and will not come again? On Mother’s Day, I stood over…
In an article in Harvard Business Review in 2017, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared that there is a “loneliness epidemic.” Whether or not…
Here in Ohio, although we are not yet out of September, the days have grown shorter and, at least for the moment, there is a touch of autumn chill in…
The single most important source of the stories of Greek mythology is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a book that had enormous influence on later poets, including…