Podcast appearances and mentions of Ted Gioia

Week 50 of Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities List brings us to three mid-20th-century thinkers wrestling with art, media, and the modern world: Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, and José Ortega y Gasset.I begin with Susan Sontag's famous essay “In Plato's Cave” from On Photography. Writing in 1972, she asks how photography changes our relationship to memory and experience. At the time, photographs were printed objects. We saved them in albums, books, or wallets. Today we carry thousands in our pockets. If photographs once captured moments, now they seem to overwhelm them.Walter Benjamin's “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” pushes this further, asking what happens to art when it can be endlessly copied. Photography and film, he argues, transform not just art but perception itself.Finally, José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses explores the rise of “mass-man”—a culture where opinions are everywhere but the pursuit of truth is optional.Taken together, these essays were more uncomfortable than I expected: the problems of our modern media world may have been visible long before smartphones, if only we'd paid attention.LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

Week 49 of Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities list brings three modern French thinkers into conversation: Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and René Girard. Unlike many earlier weeks in this project, these readings aren't novels or unified texts—they're philosophical excerpts that stand largely on their own. So rather than forcing a single theme, I consider how each of these writers might still be shaping the world we live in today.Beauvoir's The Second Sex asks why “man” is treated as the default while woman becomes the “other,” raising questions that still echo in modern debates about biology, identity, and women's health. It even makes an appearance with an interaction I had with ChatGPT!Foucault's “Eye of Power” examines surveillance and the famous “Panopticon,” showing how systems of observation quietly shape behavior. This is an idea that feels spookily prescient in our world of cameras, cookies, and algorithms. Finally, René Girard's theory of mimetic desire and scapegoating offers a striking explanation for why humans compete, blame, and sometimes unite against a chosen victim. Spoiler: I really love Girard.LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

Ahead of her new book What's So Great About the Great Books? coming out in April, Naomi Kanakia and I talked about literature from Herodotus to Tony Tulathimutte. We touched on Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Scott Alexander, Shakespeare, William James, Helen deWitt, Marx and Engels, Walter Scott, Les Miserables, Jhootha Sach, the Mahabharata, and more. Naomi also talked about some of her working habits and the history and future of the Great Books movement. Naomi, of course, writes Woman of Letters here on Substack.TranscriptHenry Oliver: Today, I am talking with Naomi Kanakia. Naomi is a novelist, a literary critic, and most importantly she writes a Substack called Woman of Letters, and she has a new book coming out, What's So Great About the Great Books? Naomi, welcome.Naomi Kanakia: Thanks for having me on.Oliver: How is the internet changing the way that literature gets discussed and criticized, and what is that going to mean for the future of the Great Books?Kanakia: How is the internet changing it? I can really speak to only how it has changed it for me. I started off as a writer of young adult novels and science fiction, and there's these very active online fan cultures for those two things.I was reading the Great Books all through that time. I started in 2010 through today. In the 2010s, it really felt like there was not a lot of online discussion of classic literature. Maybe that was just me and I wasn't finding it, but it didn't necessarily feel like there was that community.I think because there are so many strong, public-facing institutions that discuss classic literature, like the NYRB, London Review of Books, a lot of journals, and universities, too. But now on Substack, there are a number of blogs—yours, mine, a number of other ones—that are devoted to classic literature. All of those have these commenters, a community of commenters. I also follow bloggers who have relatively small followings who are reading Tolstoy, reading Middlemarch, reading even much more esoteric things.I know that for me, becoming involved in this online culture has given me much more of an awareness that there are many people who are reading the classics on their own. I think that was always true, but now it does feel like it's more of a community.Oliver: We are recording this the day after the Washington Post book section has been removed. You don't see some sort of relationship between the way these literary institutions are changing online and the way the Great Books are going to be conceived of in the future? Because the Great Books came out of a an old-fashioned, saving-the-institutions kind of radical approach to university education. We're now moving into a world where all those old things seem to be going.Kanakia: Yes. I agree. The Great Books began in the University of Chicago and Columbia University. If you look into the history of the movement, it really was about university education and the idea that you would have a common core and all undergraduates would read these books. The idea that the Great Books were for the ordinary person was really an afterthought, at least for Mortimer Adler and those original Great Books guys. Now, the Great Books in the university have had a resurgence that we can discuss, but I do think there's a lot more life and vitality in the kind of public-facing humanities than there has been.I talked to Irina Dumitrescu, who writes for TLS (The Times Literary Supplement), LRB (The London Review of Books), a lot of these places, and she also said the same thing—that a lot of these journals are going into podcasts, and they're noticing a huge interest in the humanities and in the classics even at the same time as big institutions are really scaling back on those things. Humanities majors are dropping, classics majors are getting cut, book coverage at major periodicals is going down. It does seem like there are signals that are conflicting. I don't really know totally what to make of it. I do think there is some relation between those two things.Ted Gioia on Substack is always talking about how culture is stagnant, basically, and one of the symptoms of that is that “back list” really outsells “front list” for books. Even in 2010, 50 percent of the books that were sold were front-list titles, books that had been released in the last 18 months. Now it's something like only 35 percent of books or something like that are front-list titles. These could be completely wrong, but there's been a trend.I think the decrease in interest in front-list books is really what drives the loss of these book-review pages because they mostly review front-list books. So, I think that does imply that there's a lot of interest in old books. That's what our stagnant culture means.Oliver: Why do you think your own blog is popular with the rationalists?Kanakia: I don't know for certain. There was a story I wrote that was a joke. There are all these pop nonfiction books that aim to prove something that seems counterintuitive, so I wrote a parody of one of those where I aim to prove that reading is bad for you. This book has many scientific studies that show the more you read, the worse it is because it makes you very rigid.Scott Alexander, who is the archrationalist, really liked that, and he added me to his blog roll. Because of that, I got a thousand rationalist subscribers. I have found that rationalists at least somewhat interested in the classics. I think they are definitely interested in enduring sources of value. I've observed a fair amount of interest.Oliver: How much of a lay reader are you really? Because you read scholarship and critics and you can just quote John Gilroy in the middle of a piece or something.Kanakia: Yeah. That is a good question. I have definitely gotten more interested in secondary literature. In my book, I really talk about being a lay reader and personally having a nonacademic approach to literature. I do think that, over 15 years of being a lay reader, I have developed a lot of knowledge.I've also learned the kind of secondary literature that is really important. I think having historical context adds a lot and is invaluable. Right now I'm rereading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. When I first read it in 2010, I hardly knew anything about French history. I was even talking online with someone about how most people who read Les Miserables think it's set in the French Revolution. That's basically because Americans don't really know anything about French history.Everything makes just a lot more sense the more you know about the time because it was written for people in it. For people in 1860s France, who knew everything about their own recent history, that really adds a lot to it. I still don't tend to go that much into interpretive literature, literature that tries to do readings of the stories or tell me the meaning of the stories. I feel like I haven't really gotten that much out of that.Oliver: How long have you been learning Anglo-Saxon?Kanakia: I went through a big Anglo-Saxon phase. That was in 2010. It started because I started reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. There is a great app online called General Prologue created by one of your countrymen, Terry Richardson [NB it is Terry Jones], who loved Middle English. In this app, he recites the Middle English of the General Prologue. I started listening to this app, and I thought, I just really love the rhythms and the sounds of Middle English. And it's quite easy to learn. So then, I got really into that.And then I thought, but what about Anglo-Saxon? I'm very bad at languages. I studied Latin for seven years in middle school and high school. I never really got very far, but I thought, Anglo-Saxon has to be the easiest foreign language you can learn, right? So, I got into it.I cannot sight read Anglo-Saxon, but I really got into Anglo-Saxon poetry. I really liked the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Most people probably would not like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle because it's very repetitive, but that makes it great if you're a language learner because every entry is in this very repetitive structure. I just felt such a connection. I get in trouble when I say this kind of stuff, because I'm never quiet sure if it's 100 percent true. But it's certainly one of the oldest vernacular literatures in Europe. It's just so much older than most of the other medieval literature I've read. And it just was such a window into a different part of history I never knew about.Oliver: And you particularly like “The Dream of the Rood”?Kanakia: Yeah, “The Dream of the Rood” is my favorite Anglo-Saxon poem. “The Dream of the Rood” is a poem that is told from the point of view of Christ's cross. A man is having a dream. In this dream he encounters Christ's cross, and Christ's cross starts reciting to him basically the story of the crucifixion. At the end, the cross is buried. I don't know, it was just so haunting and powerful. Yeah, it was one of my favorites.Oliver: Why do you think Byron is a better poet than Alexander Pope?Kanakia: This is an argument I cannot get into. I think this is coming up because T. S. Eliot felt that Alexander Pope was a great poet because he really exemplified the spirit of the age. I don't know. I've tried to read Pope. It just doesn't do it for me. Whereas with Byron, I read Don Juan and found it entertaining. I enjoyed it. Then, his lyric poetry is just more entertaining to read. With Alexander Pope, I'm learning a lot about what kind of poetry people wrote in the 18th century, but the joy is not there.Oliver: Okay. Can we do a quick fire round where I say the name of a book and you just say what you think of it, whatever you think of it?Kanakia: Sure.Oliver: Okay. The Odyssey.Kanakia: The Odyssey. Oh, I love The Odyssey. It has a very strange structure, where it starts with Telemachus and then there's this flashback in the middle of it. It is much more readable than The Iliad; I'll say that.Oliver: Herodotus.Kanakia: Herodotus is wild. Going into Herodotus, I really thought it was about the Persian war, which it is, but it's mostly a general overview of everything that Herodotus knew, about anything. It's been a long time since I read it. I really appreciate the voice of Herodotus, how human it is, and the accumulation of facts. It was great.Oliver: I love the first half actually. The bit about the Persian war I'm less interested in, but the first half I think is fantastic. I particularly love the Egypt book.Kanakia: Oh yeah, the Egypt book is really good.Oliver: All those like giant beetles that are made of fire or whatever; I can't remember the details, but it's completely…Kanakia: The Greeks are also so fascinated by Egypt. They go down there like what is going on out there? Then, most of what we know about Egypt comes from this Hellenistic period, when the Greeks went to Egypt. Our Egyptian kings list comes from the Hellenistic period where some scholar decided to sort out what everybody was up to and put it all into order. That's why we have such an orderly story about Egypt. That's the story that the Greeks tried to tell themselves.Oliver: Marcus Aurelius.Kanakia: Marcus Aurelius. When I first read The Meditations, which I loved, obviously, I thought, “being the Roman emperor cannot be this hard.” It really was a black pill moment because I thought, “if the emperor of Rome is so unhappy, maybe human power really doesn't do it.”Knowing more about Marcus Aurelius, he did have quite a difficult life. He was at war for most of his—just stuck in the region in Germany for ages. He had various troubles, but yeah, it really was very stoic. It was, oh, I just have to do my duty. Very “heavy is the head that wears the crown” kind of stuff. I thought, “okay, I guess being Roman emperor is not so great.”Oliver: Omar Khayyam.Kanakia: Omar Khayyam. Okay, I've only read The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald, which I loved, but I cannot formulate a strong opinion right now.Oliver: As You Like It.Kanakia: No opinions.Oliver: Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.Kanakia: Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. I do have an opinion about this, which is that they should make a redacted version of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. I normally am not a big believer in abridgements because I feel like whatever is there is there. But, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, first of all, has a long portion before Boswell even meets Johnson. That portion drags; it's not that great. Then it has all these like letters that Johnson wrote, which also are not that great. What's really good is when Boswell just reports everything Johnson ever said, which is about half the book. You get a sense of Johnson's conversation and his personality, and that is very gripping. I've definitely thought that with a different presentation, this could still be popular. People would still read this.Oliver: The Communist Manifesto.Kanakia: The Communist Manifesto. It's very stirring. I love The Communist Manifesto. It has very haunting, powerful lines. I won't try to quote from it because I'll misquote them.Oliver: But it is remarkably well written.Kanakia: Oh yeah, it is a great work of literature.Oliver: Yeah.Kanakia: I read Capital [Das Kapital], which is not a great work of literature, and I would venture to say that it is not necessarily worth reading. It really feels like Marx's reputation is built on other political writings like The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and works like that, which really seem to have a lot more meat on the bone than Capital.Oliver: Pragmatism by William James.Kanakia: Pragmatism. I mean, I've mentioned that in my book. I love William James in general. I think William James was writing in this 19th-century environment where it seemed like some form of skepticism was the only rational solution. You couldn't have any source of value, and he really tried to cut through that with Pragmatism and was like, let's just believe the things that are good to believe. It is definitely at least useful to think, although someone else can always argue with you about what is useful to believe. But, as a personal guide for belief, I think it is still useful.Oliver: Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw.Kanakia: No strong opinions. It was a long time ago that I read Major Barbara.Oliver: Tell me what you like about James Fenimore Cooper.Kanakia: James Fenimore Cooper. Oh, this is great. I have basically a list of Great Books that I want to read, but four or five years ago, I thought, “what's in all the other books that I know the names of but that are not reputed, are not the kind of books you still read?”That was when I read Walter Scott, who I really love. And I just started reading all kinds of books that were kind of well known but have kind of fallen into literary disfavor. In almost every case, I felt like I got a lot out of these books. So, nowadays when I approach any realm of literature, I always look for those books.In 19th-century American literature, the biggest no-longer-read book is The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, which was America's first bestseller. He was the first American novelist that had a high reputation in Europe. The Last of the Mohicans is kind of a historical romance, à la Walter Scott, but much more tightly written and much more tightly plotted.Cooper has written five novels, the Leatherstocking Tales, that are all centered around this very virtuous, rough-hewn frontiersman, Natty Bumppo. He has his best friend, Chingachgook, who is the last of the Mohicans. He's the last of his tribe. And the two of these guys are basically very sad and stoic. Chingachgook is distanced from his tribe. Chingachgook has a tribe of Native Americans that he hates—I want to say it's the Huron. He's always like, “they're the bad ones,” and he's always fighting them. Then, Natty Bumppo doesn't really love settled civilization. He's not precisely at war with it, but he does not like the settlers. They're kind of stuck in the middle. They have various adventures, and I just thought it was so haunting and powerful.I've been reading a lot of other 19th-century American literature, and virtually none of it treats Native Americans with this kind of respect. There's a lot of diversity in the Native American characters; there's really an attempt to show how their society works and the various ways that leadership and chiefship works among them. There's this very haunting moment in The Last of the Mohicans, where this aged chief, Tamenund, comes out and starts speaking. This is a chief who, in American mythology, was famous for being a friend to the white people. But, James Fenimore Cooper writing in the 1820s has Tamenund come out at 80 years old and say, “we have to fight; we have to fight the white people. That's our only option.” It was just such a powerful moment and such a powerful book.I was really, really enthused. I read all of these Leatherstocking Tales. It was also a very strange experience to read these books that are generally supposed to be very turgid and boring, and then I read them and was like, “I understand. I'm so transported.” I understand exactly why readers in the 1820s loved this.Oliver: Which Walter Scott books do you like?Kanakia: I love all the Walter Scott books I've read, but the one I liked best was Kenilworth. Have you ever read Kenilworth?Oliver: I don't know that one.Kanakia: Yeah, it's about Elizabeth I, who had a romantic relationship with one of her courtiers.Oliver: The Earl of Essex?Kanakia: Yeah. She really thought they were going to get married, but then it turned out he was secretly married. Basically, I guess the implication is that he killed his wife in order to marry Queen Elizabeth I. It's a novel all about him and that situation, and it just felt very tightly plotted. I really enjoyed it.Oliver: What did you think of Rejection?Kanakia: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte? Initially when I read this book, I enjoyed it, but I was like, “life cannot possibly be this sad.” It's five or six stories about these people who just have nothing going on. Their lives are so miserable, they can't find anyone to sleep with, and they're just doomed to be alone forever. I was like, “life can't be this bad.” But now thinking back over it, it is one of the most memorable books I've read in the last year. It really sticks with you. I feel like my opinion of this book has gone up a lot in retrospect.Oliver: How antisemitic is the House of Mirth?Kanakia: That is a hotly debated question, which I mentioned in my book. I think there has been a good case made that Edith Wharton, the author of House of Mirth, who was from an old New York family, was herself fairly antisemitic and did not personally like Jewish people. What she portrays in this book is that this old New York society also was highly suspicious of Jewish people and was organized to keep Jewish people out.In this book there is a rich Jewish man, Simon Rosedale, and there's a poor woman, Lily Bart. Lily Bart's main thing is whether she's going to marry the poor guy, Lawrence Selden, or the rich guy, Percy Gryce. She can't choose. She doesn't want to be poor, but she also is always bored by the rich guys. Meanwhile, through the whole book, there's Simon Rosedale, who's always like, “you should marry me.” He's the rich Jewish guy. He's like, “you should marry me. I will give you lots of money. You can do whatever you want.”Everybody else kind of just sees her as a woman and as a wife; he really sees her as an ally in his social climbing. That's his main motivation. The book is relatively clear that he has a kind of respect for her that nobody else does. Then, over the course of the book, she also gains a lot more respect for him. Basically, late in the book, she decides to marry him, but she has fallen a lot in the world. He's like, “that particular deal is not available anymore,” but he does offer her another deal that—although she finds it not to her taste—is still pretty good.He basically is like, “I'll give you some money, you'll figure out how to rehabilitate your reputation, and later down the line, we can figure something out.” So, I think with a great author like Edith Wharton, there's power in these portrayals. I felt it hard to come away from it feeling like the book is like a really antisemitic book.Oliver: Now, you note that the Great Books movement started out as something quite socially aspirational. Do you think it's still like that?Kanakia: I do think so. Yeah. For me, that's 100 percent what it was because I majored in econ. I always felt kind of inadequate as a writer against people who had majored in English. Then I started off as a science fiction writer, young adult writer, and I was like, “I'm going to read all these Great Books and then I'll have read the books that everybody else has read.” In my mind, that's also what it was—that there was some upper crust or literary society that was reading all these Great Books.That's really what did it. I do think there's still an element of aspiration to it because it's a club that you can join, that anyone can join. It's very straightforward to be a Great Books reader, and so I think there's still something there. I think because the Great Books movement has such a democratic quality to it, it actually doesn't get you to the top socially, which has always been the true, always been the case. But, that's okay. As long as you end up higher than where you started, that's fine.Oliver: What makes a book great?Kanakia: I talk about it this in the book, and I go through many different authors' conceptions of what makes a book great or what constitutes a classic. I don't know that anyone has come up with a really satisfying answer. The Horatian formulation from Horace—that a book is great or an author is great if it has lasted for a hundred years—is the one that seems to be the most accurate. Like, any book that's still being read a hundred years after it was written has a greatness.I do think that T. S. Eliott's formulation—that a civilization at its height produces certain literature and that literature partakes of the greatness of the civilization and summarizes the greatness of the civilization—does seem to have some kind of truth to it.But it's hard, right? Because the greatest French novel is In Search of Lost Time, but I don't know that anyone would say that the France in the 1920s was at its height. It's not a prescriptive thing, but it does seem like the way we read many of these Great Books, like Moby Dick, it feels like you're like communing with the entire society that produced it. So, maybe there's something there.Oliver: Now, you've used a list from Clifton Fadiman.Kanakia: Yes.Oliver: Rather than from Mortimer Adler or Harold Bloom or several others. Why this list?Kanakia: Well, the best reason is that it's actually the list I've just been using for the last 15 years. I went to a science fiction convention in 2009, Readercon, and at this science fiction convention was Michael Dirda, who was a Washington Post book critic. He had recently come out with his book, Classics for Pleasure, which I also bought and liked. But he said that the list he had always used was this Clifton Fadiman book. And so when I decided to start reading the Great Books, I went and got that book. I have perused many other lists over time, but that was always the list that seemed best to me.It seemed to have like the best mix. There's considerable variation amongst these lists, but there's also a lot of overlap. So any of these lists is going to have Dickens on it, and Tolstoy, and stuff like that. So really, you're just thinking about, “aside from Dickens and Tolstoy and George Eliot and Walt Whitman and all these people, who are the other 50 authors that you're going be reading?”The Mortimer Adler list is very heavy on philosophy. It has Plotinus on it. It has all these scientific works. I don't know, it didn't speak to me as much. Whereas, this Clifton Fadiman and John Major list has all these Eastern works on it. It has The Tale of Genji, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Story of the Stone, and that just spoke to me a little bit more.Oliver: What modern books will be on a future Great Books list, whether it's from someone alive or someone since the war.Kanakia: Have you ever heard of Robert Caro?Oliver: Sure.Kanakia: Yeah. I think his Lyndon Johnson books are great books. They have changed the field of biography. They're so complete, they seem to summarize an entire era, epoch. They're highly rated, but I feel like they're underrated as literature.What else? I was actually a little bit surprised in this Clifton Fadiman-John Major book, which came out in 1999, that there are not more African Americans in their list. Like, Invisible Man definitely seemed like a huge missed work. You know, it's hard. You would definitely want a book that has undergone enough critical evaluation that people are pretty certain that it is great. A lot of things that are more recent have not undergone that evaluation yet, but Invisible Man has, as have some works by Martin Luther King.Oliver: What about The Autobiography of Malcolm X?Kanakia: I would have to reread. I feel like it hasn't been evaluated much as a literary document.Oliver: Helen DeWitt?Kanakia: It's hard to say. It's so idiosyncratic, The Last Samurai, but it is certainly one of the best novels of the last 25 years.Oliver: Yeah.Kanakia: It is hard to say, because there's nothing else quite like it. But I would love if The Last Samurai was on a list like this; that would be amazing.Oliver: If someone wants to try the Great Books, but they think that those sort of classic 19th-century novels are too difficult—because they're long and the sentences are weird or whatever—what else should they do? Where else should they start?Kanakia: Well, it depends on what they're into, or it depends on their personality type. I think like there are people who like very, very difficult literature. There are people who are very into James Joyce and Proust. I think for some people the cost-benefit is better. If they're going to be pouring over some book for a long time, they would prefer if it was overtly difficult.If they're not like that, then I would say, there are many Great Books that are more accessible. Hemingway is a good one and Grapes of Wrath is wonderful. The 19th-century American books tend to be written in a very different register than the English books. If you read Moby Dick, it feels like it's written in a completely different language than Charles Dickens, even though they're writing essentially at the same time.Oliver: Is there too much Freud on the list that you've used?Kanakia: Maybe. I know that Interpretation of Dreams is on that list, which I've tried to read and have decided life is too short. I didn't really buy it, but I have read a fair amount of Freud. My impression of Freud was always that I would read Freud and somehow it would just seem completely fanciful or far out, like wouldn't ring true. But then when I started reading Freud, it was more the opposite. I was like, oh yeah, this seems very, very true.Like this battle between like the id and the ego and the super ego, and this feeling that like the psyche is at war with itself. Human beings really desire to be singular and exceptional, but then you're constantly under assault by the reality principle, which is that you're insignificant. That all seemed completely true. But then he tries to cure this somehow, which does not seem a curable problem. And he also situates the problem in some early sexual development, which also did not necessarily ring true. But no, I wouldn't say there's too much. Freud is a lot of fun. People should read Freud.Oliver: Which of the Great Books have you really not liked?Kanakia: I do get asked this quite a bit. I would say the Great Book that I really felt like—at least in translation—was not that rewarding in an unabridged version was Don Quixote. Because at least half the length of Don Quixote is these like interpolated novellas that are really long and tedious. I felt Don Quixote was a big slog. But maybe someday I'll go back and reread it and love it. Who knows?Oliver: Now you wrote that the question of biography is totally divorced from the question of what art is and how it operates. What do you think of George Orwell's supposition that if Shakespeare came back tomorrow, and we found out he used to rape children that we should—we would not say, you know, it's fine to carry on to doing that because he might write another King Lear.Kanakia: Well, if we discovered that Shakespeare was raping children, he should go to prison for that. No. It's totally divorced in both senses. You don't get any credit in the court of law because you are the writer of King Lear. If I murdered someone and then I was hauled in front of a judge and they were like, oh, Naomi's a genius, I wouldn't get off for murder. Nor should I get off for murder.So in terms of like whether we would punish Shakespeare for his crime of raping children, I don't think King Lear should count at all, but it's never used that way. It's never should someone go to prison or not for their crimes, because they're a genius. It's always used the other way, which is should we read King Lear knowing that the author raped children, but I also feel like that is immaterial. If you read King Lear, you're not enabling someone to rape children.Oliver: There's an almost endless amount of discussion these days about the Great Books and education and the value of the humanities, and what's the future of it all. What is your short opinion on that?Kanakia: My short opinion is that the Great Books at least are going to be fine. The Great Books will continue to be read, and they would even survive the university. All these books predate the university and they will survive the university. I feel like the university has stewarded literature in its own way for a while now and has made certain choices in that stewardship. I think if that stewardship was given up to more voluntary associations that had less financial support, then I think the choices would probably be very different. But I still think the greatest works would survive.Oliver: Now this is a quote from the book: “I am glad that reactionaries love the Great Books. They've invited a Trojan horse into their own camp.” Tell us what you mean by that.Kanakia: Let's say you believed in Christian theocracy, that you thought America should be organized on explicitly Christian principles. And because you believe in Christian theocracy, you organize a school that teaches the Great Books. Many of these schools that are Christian schools that have Great Books programs will also teach Nietzsche. They definitely put some kind of spin on Nietzsche. But they will teach anti-Christ, and that is a counterpoint to Christian morality and Christian theology. There are many things that you'll read in the Great Books that are corrosive to various kinds of certainties.If someone who I think is bad starts educating themselves in the Great Books, I don't think that the Great Books are going to make them worse from my perspective. So it's good.Oliver: How did reading the Mahabharata change you?Kanakia: Oh yeah, so the Mahabharata is a Hindu epic from, let's say, the first century AD. I'm Indian and most Indians are familiar with the basic outline of the Mahabharata story because it's told in various retellings, and there's a TV serial that my parents would rent from the Indian store growing up and we would watch it tape by tape. So I'm very familiar with it. Like there's never been a time I have not known this story.But I was also familiar with the idea that there is a written version in Sanskrit that's extremely long. It is 10 times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. This Mahabharata story is not that long. I've read a version of it that's about 800 pages long. So how could something that's 10 times this long be the same? A new unabridged translation came out 10 years ago. So I started reading it, and it basically contains the entire Sanskrit Vedic worldview in it.I had never been exposed to this very coherently laid-out version of what I would call Hindu cosmology and ethics. Hindus don't really get taught those things in a very organized way. The book is basically about dharma, the principle of rightness and how this principle of rightness orders the universe and how it basically results in everybody getting their just deserts in various ways. As I was reading the book, I was like, this seems very true that there is some cosmic rebalancing here, and that everything does turn out more or less the way it should, which is not something that I can defend on a rational level.But just reading the book, it just made me feel like, yes, that is true. There is justice, the universe is organized by justice. It took me about a year to read the whole thing. I started waking up at 5:00 a.m. and reading for an hour each morning, and it just was a really magical, profound experience that brought me a lot closer to my grandmother's religious beliefs.Oliver: Is it ever possible to persuade someone with arguments that they should read literature, or is it just something that they have to have an inclination toward and then follow someone's example? Because I feel like we have so many columns and op-eds and “books are good because of X reason, and it's very important because of Y reason.” And like, who cares? No one cares. If you are persuaded, you take all that very seriously and you argue about what exactly are the precise reasons we should say. And if you're not persuaded, you don't even know this is happening.And what really persuades you is like, oh, Naomi sounds pretty compelling about the Mahabharata. That sounds cool. I'll try that. It's much more of a temperamental, feelingsy kind of thing. Is it possible to argue people into thinking about this differently? Or should we just be doing what we do and setting an example and hoping that people will follow.Kanakia: As to whether it's possible or not, I do not know. But I do think these columns are too ambitious. A thousand-word column and the imagined audience for this column is somebody who doesn't read books at all, who doesn't care about literature at all. And then in a thousand-word column, you're going to persuade them to care about literature. This is no good. It's so unnecessary.Whereas there's a much broader range of people who love to read books, but have never picked up Moby Dick or have never picked up Middlemarch, or who like maybe loved Middlemarch, but never thought maybe I should then go on and read Jane Austen and George Eliot.I think trying to shift people from “I don't read books at all; reading books is not something I do,” to being a Great Books card-carrying lover of literature is a lot. I really aim for a much lower result than that, which is to whatever extent people are interested in literature, they should pursue that interest. And as the rationalists would say, there's a lot of alpha in that; there's a lot to be gained from converting people who are somewhat interested into people who are very interested.Oliver: If there was a more widespread practice of humanism in education and the general culture, would that make America into a more liberal country in any way?Kanakia: What do you mean by humanism?Oliver: You know, the old-fashioned liberal arts approach, the revival of the literary journal culture, the sort of depolitical approach to literature, the way things used to be, as it were.Kanakia: It couldn't hurt. It couldn't hurt is my answer to that question.Oliver: Okay.Kanakia: What you're describing is basically the way I was educated. I went to Catholic school in DC at St. Anselm's Abbey School, in Northeast, DC, grade school. Highly recommend sending your little boys there. No complaints about the school. They talked about humanism all the time and all these civic virtues. I thought it was great. I don't know what people in other schools learn, but I really feel like it was a superior way of teaching.Now, you know, it was Catholic school, so a lot of people who graduated from my school are conservatives and don't really have the beliefs that I have, but that's okay.Oliver: Tell us about your reading habits.Kanakia: I read mostly ebooks. I really love ebooks because you can make the type bigger. I just read all the time. They vary. I don't wake up at 5:00 a.m. to read anymore. Sometimes if I feel like I'm not reading enough—because I write this blog, and the blog doesn't get written unless I'm reading. That's the engine, and so sometimes I set aside a day each week to read. But generally, the reading mostly takes care of itself.What I tend to get is very into a particular thing, and then I'll start reading more and more in that area. Recently, I was reading a lot of New Yorker stories. So I started reading more and more of these storywriters that have been published in the New Yorker and old anthologies of New Yorker stories. And then eventually I am done. I'm tired. It's time to move on.Oliver: But do you read several books at once? Do you make notes? Do you abandon books? How many hours a day do you read?Kanakia: Hours a day: Because my e-reader keeps these stats, I'd say 15 or 20 hours a week of reading. Nowadays because I write for the blog, I often think as I'm reading how I would frame a post about this. So I look for quotes, like what quote I would look at. I take different kinds of notes. I'll make more notes if I'm more confused by what is going on. Especially with nonfiction books, I'll try sometimes to make notes just to iron out what exactly I think is happening or what I think the argument is. But no, not much of a note taker.Oliver: What will you read next?Kanakia: What will I read next? Well, I've been thinking about getting back into Indian literature. Right now I'm reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. But there's an Indian novel called Jhootha Sach, which is a partition novel that is originally in Hindi. And it's also a thousand pages long, and is frequently compared to Les Miserables and War and Peace. So I'm thinking about tackling that finally.Oliver: Naomi Kanakia, thank you very much.Kanakia: Thanks for having me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

For Week 48 of Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities List, I step into the strange, shimmering world of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Borges' Ficciones, and Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude.We start with a review of myth, fantasy, fairy stories, and magic: why we need them and what purpose they can serve in our lives (aside from being really fun). Kafka's tragic insect-turned-son is an isolated, powerless creature, unable to find even a way to communicate. Borges dazzles at a remove, writing about books that never existed and worlds that ought to. García Márquez slows us down in Macondo, Colombia, where memory, invention, and the wonder seep into ordinary life.Together, they sketch the contours of magical realism, worlds where the bizarre is presented as normal and the universe feels just slightly tilted. It's a genre I love, one that resists strict materialism and invites wonder back into fiction.And for art? We look at **La Sagrada Familia**—Gaudí's breathtaking, almost-otherworldly cathedral—an architectural reminder that the strange and the sacred often live side by side.LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

With only five weeks left in this year-long journey, I can feel the end approaching—less like a high-wire act and more like gathering momentum toward something unknown. Week 47 of Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities course explores twentieth-century American fiction through short stories and novel excerpts, revealing a distinctly American voice: sharp dialogue, vivid settings, and an experimental edge.O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi” (1906): A charming story of love and sacrifice.F. Scott Fitzgerald, “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922): Wealth, excess, and a surprising twist.Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers” (1927): Sparse, tension-filled dialogue.William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929, excerpt): Challenging, with shifting time and perspective.Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1947, excerpt): A powerful sense of invisibility and identity.Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948): Disturbing and unforgettable.Flannery O'Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1955): A Southern Gothic tale with shocking turns.Together, these works feel spacious, restless, and distinctly American—and they remind me how much more willing I am now to embrace difficult, even strange, books.This is a year-long challenge! Join me next week for a little Magical Realism.LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month ImmersiveHumanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

Week 46 of Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities List brought me to two works by Sigmund Freud: An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I finished reading a few days early but needed time to let these ideas settle—and disturb me.What struck me first was Freud's immense influence. What followed was a growing discomfort with how fully his ideas have saturated modern thought. Freud offers a powerful explanatory system: the division of personality into id, ego, and superego; the dominance of unconscious drives; the reduction of human action to instinct, repetition, and adaptation. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he goes further, proposing forces like the death drive to explain trauma and repetition.But in explaining so much, Freud seems to make the world smaller. Virtue, meaning, and the idea of an embodied soul quietly disappear, replaced by mechanisms and drives. I'm not convinced we're better for it—but understanding Freud helps explain the shape of the 20th century itself.LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

Das ist heute ein Quickie, aber das Thema scheint mir so relevant, dass ich es kurz teilen möchte. Außerdem möchte ich wieder mit ein paar Fragen zum Ende der Episode zum Nachdenken provozieren. Schicken Sie mir gerne Ihre Ideen dazu, auch gerne via X. Die Kernfrage, die ich mir in der letzten Zeit in Diskussionen mit guten Journalisten immer wieder stelle ist: sind wir heute besser informiert als früher, also nehmen wir etwa als Vergleichszeitraum die 1960er Jahre an. Oder man sollte vielleicht noch etwas genauer formulieren: wer ist heute besser informiert als früher und wer vielleicht schlechter? Auslöser war unter anderem ein Artikel von Ted Gioia, auf den ich kürzlich gestoßen bin, der sich im Kern auf einen Artikel einer Gruppe britischer Journalisten bezieht. Und was diese Journalisten herausgefunden haben, ist schon — selbst nach heutigen Maßstäben — abenteuerlich. Gioia schreibt “There's disturbing evidence that a growing number of experts cited in the media simply don't exist. And they are showcased in some of the most prestigious newspapers and online platforms.A group of journalists recently tried to verify the existence of 50 experts featured more than a thousand times in prominent articles. But these people can't be found in the real world. In many instances, the articles include a photo that appears to be AI-generated.” und weiter: It's a lot easier to create these fake experts than to prove their non-existence. Sind wir also besser oder schlechter informiert, und wer ist überhaupt »Wir«? Weitere Zitate der Episode: »Nullius in Verba!«, Motto der Royal Society zurückgehend auf Horaz: »Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri.« Hexenmeister oder Zauberlehrling? Die Wissensgesellschaft in der Krise ist verfügbar! Zum Vertiefen in derartige Themen, sowie um dieses Projekt zu unterstützen! Andere Episoden Episode 143: Auf Sand gebaut? Episode 138: Im Windschatten der Narrative, ein Gespräch mit Ralf M. Ruthardt Episode 134: Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt? Transzendent oder Transient Episode 133: Desinformiere Dich! Ein Gespräch mit Jakob Schirrmacher Episode 130: Populismus und (Ordo)liberalismus, ein Gespräch mit Nils Hesse Episode 121: Künstliche Unintelligenz Episode 116: Science and Politics, A Conversation with Prof. Jessica Weinkle Episode 112: Nullius in Verba — oder: Der Müll der Wissenschaft Episode 106: Wissenschaft als Ersatzreligion? Ein Gespräch mit  Manfred Glauninger Episode 102: Live im MQ, Verantwortung. Ein Gespräch mit Daphne Hruby Episode 93: Covid. Die unerklärliche Stille nach dem Sturm. Ein Gespräch mit Jan David Zimmermann Episode 84: (Epistemische) Krisen? Ein Gespräch mit Jan David Zimmermann Referenzen Are These 50 Experts Real People? - by Ted Gioia Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) Manufacturing Consent S.J. Taylor, Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times's Man in Moscow, Oxford University Press (1990)  Doomberg, Fit to Print. One news event, many spins: A global propaganda tour. (2026) Nullius in Verba — Royal Society    

Cheryl Drury, a lifelong reader, is on a misssion to read a long list of classic books which she found on Ted Gioia's Substack page. She now has her own Substack page that features her podcast "Crack the Book" about classic books. We talk about The Great Gatsby, The Red Badge of Courage, Romeo and Juliet and other works of Shakespeare, The Odyssey, David Foster Wallace, James Joyce's Ulysses, Swann's Way, Les Miserables, Louise May Alcott's Little Women, Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice, reading on a Kindle vs hardcopies, things we learn about life and human nature from reading classic books, Great Expectations and Charles Dickens, Gentleman in Moscow, Dead Souls, Fathers and Sons, The Brothers Karamazov, The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, characters, taking notes while reading, Dante, what makes a book a classic, Bleak House, Blood Meridian, The Road and Cormac McCarthy, Canticles for Liebowitz, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, reading aloud, poetry, Pablo Neruda, writing every day, why we love to read, Breakfast at Tiffany's, In Cold Blood, Brave New World, Blood Child, This is How you Lose the Time War, Isaac Asimov, classic science fiction, Don Quixote, The Golden Ass, and more.  Links are on the podcast shownotes page Support the show through Patreon

Federico Durand abre el programa con un paisaje sonoro que introduce el "Nuevo Romanticismo" de Ted Gioia: una respuesta sensible al control tecnológico y al vaciamiento emocional de nuestro tiempo. Hania Rani, Meredi y Mari Samuelsen, Santi Campos y Raquel Bausà, Ryuichi Sakamoto o DakhaBrakha cierran una reflexión donde arte, alma y resistencia trazan un humanismo contemporáneo.Las estrellas giran en el pinar Federico Durand Pequeñas Melodias IIKKIDancing with Ghosts Hania Rani; Patrick Watson Ghosts Gondwana RecordsSentimental Value Hania Rani Sentimental Value Gondwana RecordsWoven Song Hania Rani; Ólafur Arnalds some kind of peace — piano reworks Mercury ClassicsWhite flowers take their bath Meredi; Mari Samuelsen; Scoring Berlin; Jonathan Stockhammer Meredi: White Flowers Take Their Bath Deutsche Grammophon (DG)Infància i Joventut Santi Campos; Raquel Bausà Medalla de Plata La Cupula MusicIrene Santi Campos; Raquel Bausà Medalla de Plata La Cúpula MusicSvandalen Benjamin Mørk; Arve Henriksen The Valleys CAMODid You Hear That Sound Abdullah Ibrahim Dream Time ENJA RECORDS Matthias Winckelmann20220304 Ryuichi Sakamoto 12 MilanAlambari DakhaBrakha Alambari DakhaBrakhaAlternate Star Rob Burger The Grid Western VinylEscuchar audio

This week's readings on Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities List felt unexpectedly thin and disjointed. We stepped backward in time to Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire, which made me keenly aware of how much I've come to rely on the list's chronological momentum. I also continue to struggle with “selections,” especially in poetry, where I suspect I shortchange the material when time and energy are limited.Flaubert's short story “A Simple Life,” from Trois Contes, follows the entire life of Félicité, a housemaid whose quiet existence unfolds in a series of small, often bleak episodes. It's beautifully written but profoundly sad—an example of realism so stripped of meaning that the character almost disappears.Baudelaire proved even harder for me. Despite repeated attempts (in both English and French), I found Les Fleurs du Mal abrasive rather than illuminating. This week reminded me that this project isn't about comfort or personal taste—and sometimes, that's the point.LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

Stepping inside an Impressionist painting? Yes, please.Week 41 of Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities Course made me realize something startling: these books weren't picked for my enjoyment--and yet I loved them anyway. This week's readings, Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton and the “Overture” to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, carry us right into the early twentieth century.I approached James with dread, expecting a slow narrative, but instead I found a moody, infinitely readable novel built around obsession, property, and desire. With a small cast and dialogue-driven scenes, it feels almost theatrical, no surprise since James briefly wrote plays. But it's also chilling in its fixation on “stuff” and ownership. This one was a winner.Proust, meanwhile, surprised me with prose that felt dreamlike, luminous, and unexpectedly funny. I had expected dense, boring, and pointless--Proust was none of those. The famous madeleine scene becomes a meditation on memory that expands from a sensation as small as a crumb into an entire world.Though radically different on the surface, James and Proust share a similar impressionistic quality, finding vast meaning in subtle gestures. A brilliant pairing--and a week I adored, even if Ted doesn't care.The Housekeeping:LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

Transcript taken from SMGtheHouser.substack.com This week, a break from our work solving all the problems of small scale developers in rural America. Besides, our work relies on the success of tech entrepreneurs just as much as it does with municipalities, small business owners, manufacturers and advocates. So it's big tech and entertainment that's got my mind captured this time around. Ted Gioia's recent Substack on George Avakian's entrance into the teenage idol craze circa 1958 left me in my own stream of consciousness, reliving then to now and our slip into idiocracy with MAMLMs (modern advanced machine learning models). What's specifically got me frustrated is our consistent habit of giving up so much agency over tech and the enshitification that ensues. Is our society at large really ok with giving AI models a pass? If so, how did we get here? What began the slippery slope into permission for intellectual sludge which in our time might be on the precipice of being used to eliminate jobs, yours and mine, while further degrading the value of intellectual rigor? Capitalism is good at placing monetary value on a product or service. What it can't do, what it never could do, is place a value on quality. It can't critique, it can't consider, it can't make you look cool in front of your lover while you make an obscure reference. People like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren understood plainly that the Revolutionary ideals that started it all, themselves bearing ideas as far afield from each other as those of John Locke, The Marquis de Condorset and the Haudenosaunee would not last unless the new country they helped launch waseducated. I'd like to believe they were really after a populace rooted in intellectual rigor.  People needed to be able to judge quality. They needed to agree on minimums of toleration while also being able to envision a future rooted in intellectual pursuit. They needed to think for themselves. So, we created the teenage idol. Not knocking you kiddos. I mean, it's adults who keep messing this stuff up. Alongside the creation of a new suburban landscape that launched an entire literary and cultural onslaught based on boredom and depression, came the desire to create cheap art. It was supposed, this would be most desirable to teenagers, fresh to market and flush with disposable income. An advantageous feature for record labels and book publishers was this stuff could be made on the cheap. Why deal with sophisticated adult performers and writers who believe in the artistic process, have 'standards' when you can sign kids with desperate parents. Hell, let's do away with A&R departments. Don't need those anymore. Stan Freberg saw it coming. It's quaint to hear, 'So long music parasite'. Surely, or so he thought, jazz would prevail over the trite. Here's his Payola Roll Blues: Right side of artistry. Wrong side of history. How does this relate to the here and now? Roughly speaking, we've had artists from the mid century to now insisting to us through their art to pay attention. Zappa's Joe of Joe's Garage fame ended up a cucumber living inside his head because, even as the record business debased his fantasy society, faschistic forces were tightening the screws on the public, a public willing to go along in the name of morality. Of cleanliness. We cut music and art programs for everyday America. We amped up the morality police running parallel with the desecration of industrial America. Manufacturing America. Working America. We gave each other permission in a two-parent-working-three-or-four-jobs-household to cut corners on quality of thought. We stopped going out. We stopped having the money… 'not enough time for that'. We stopped believing that our popular cultural pursuits should challenge our notions. Not enough time for that. This led to the next logical conclusion. Don't like being challenged by your college professor, just declare you're triggered and start convulsing on the floor. Let's face it, by the time we got ahold of the fact that suburbia can't pay for itself, and that we're really not sure what 'good' art or music is anymore, and that our kids are getting to college without having read a single novel, now AI is being sold to us as the next big thing, totally going to change the world, totally awesome BTW in totally vague terms. And likely , because it's all totally controlled by an elite who got pants-ed a thousand times in high school for being in the A/V club, is totally coming for your job while stealing your work content even as it can't totally do everything it's creators say it can totally do. Totally indeed. Totally needless. Totally worthless. We've gone from giving permission for lower quality art to giving permission for companies to 'aggregate' art, for free, in order to feed the AI beast. After all, it's just content, right? Why develop the largest opportunity for blanket licensing payments when you can steal writ large across the entire creative class economy? I'm reminded of what it was like as a teenage performing artist forty years ago. 'We can't pay but hey, it's a great opportunity for you to…. get your name out there.' Now the corporate state takes your very identity and converts it into profit. Most folks are too busy surviving to understand how bad this is, let alone understand how we got here. Because, after all, all those imaginary guitar notes, and other tasty thoughts, remain in the imagination of this imaginator. Watch your step, the white zone is for loading and unloading…..

Week 40 of Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities Course brings together three demanding—and deeply philosophical—works: Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor, and Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. But before we get started, I offer a short primer on reading Russian lit. The names can be a real challenge!Tolstoy's novella, written after his spiritual “conversion,” is a devastating meditation on death, meaning, and self-deception—circular in structure but spiraling ever deeper. It may be the finest short work I've read so far. Dostoyevsky's famous parable interrupts the narrative of The Brothers Karamazov to pose unsettling questions about freedom, faith, and institutional power, turning conventional religious assumptions upside down. Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil proved the most challenging: dense, contrary, and deliberately destabilizing, it rejects inherited moral frameworks in favor of examining desire, psychology, and power. Together, these works confront the shifting relationship between God, morality, and the modern self—making this one of the most intellectually intense weeks of the project.We are back next week with French writers who offer a totally different tone. See you soon!LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

405 - Autorevole Senza ScrivereCome costruire credibilità e fiducia anche se non sei uno scrittore. Viviamo in un mondo di sovrabbondanza. Idee ovunque. Contenuti infiniti. Opinioni che si accavallano senza sosta. Un mondo in cui avere nuove idee vale sempre meno. E in cui, invece, diventa sempre più prezioso saper riconoscere quali idee contano davvero. Quali adottare. Come usarle. E cosa fare per evitare che si rompano strada facendo.E per fare questo, no, non serve essere uno scrittore.Serve esperienza. Serve sensibilità. Serve gusto. Serve la capacità di valutare, scegliere e mettere in evidenza ciò che conta da ciò che è superfluo.Ecco cosa mi ha scritto ieri un esperto che ha iniziato da poco a scrivere online: “Capisco che devo aumentare la mia visibilità, dimostrare autorevolezza, costruire fiducia.Il problema è che io non sono uno scrittore. Non l'ho mai davvero fatto, e non è una competenza che ho coltivato dopo la scuola. Come ne esco?” Se sei un esperto, hai probabilmente passato anni a costruire competenze reali. Hai esperienza. Hai visto errori, tentativi, fallimenti, soluzioni che funzionano e altre no. Peccato però che tu non sia uno scrittore. Ecco che allora risale quel pregiudizio silenzioso: Autorevolezza = Scrivere nuove idee. Inventarsi cose nuove. Ma è un pregiudizio sbagliato. La realtà è un'altra. La maggior parte dei cosiddetti “thought leader” non sono creatori puri. Sono curatori. Organizzano. Analizzano. Sintetizzano. Danno senso a ciò che altri producono.Se ti guardi intorno con attenzione, ti accorgi che molti dei nomi che consideriamo punti di riferimento fanno esattamente questo.Alcuni esempi evidenti:Seth GodinCura storie, modelli mentali e idee su marketing e cultura, distillandoli in brevi riflessioni quotidiane.Maria PopovaCura libri, lettere, saggi e opere d'arte, intrecciandoli in riflessioni profonde sul significato e sulla creatività.James ClearCura ricerca scientifica, psicologia ed esempi reali, trasformandoli in framework semplici sulle abitudini.Ali AbdaalCura strumenti, studi e metodi di apprendimento, traducendo sistemi complessi in guide pratiche.Austin KleonCura citazioni, libri, arte e routine creative, remixandoli in incoraggiamenti pratici.Naval RavikantCura intuizioni filosofiche, tweet e interviste, rielaborando il proprio pensiero nel tempo.E l'elenco potrebbe continuare a lungo: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, David Perell, Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans, Daniel Pink, Kevin Kelly, Michel Bauwens, Ben Thompson, Ted Gioia, Cal Newport, Marie Dollé, e molti altri ancora.Il pattern è chiarissimo. Queste persone non si invenatno “idee nuove”. Mappano territori. Collegano punti. Aiutano a vedere ciò che era già lì, ma in modo più chiaro.L'essere autorevoli (influenti) oggi non nasce quindi dall'inventarsi nuove idee, metodi o prompt ad ogni piè sospinto. Nasce dal saper scegliere, dal saper fornire contesto, dal ripetere andando sempre più a fondo. Il problema è che purtroppo, siamo ancora abituati a guardare il mondo come se le idee fossero scarse. Esiste quindi un'altra strada per poter raggiungere questo scopo. E questa è una strada che:non richiede di diventare scrittoricostruisce autorevolezza più velocementesfrutta il tuo vero punto di forza: la capacità di giudizio maturata con l'esperienza.E questa è un'opportunità enorme. Perché i contenuti originali dimostrano che sai pensare. Ma i contenuti curati dimostrano che pensi davvero, con continuità, su ciò che conta per uno specifico pubblico.Oggi, con o senza AI, chiunque può scrivere un buon articolo. Molto meno comune è trovare qualcuno che mantenga una direzione chiara nel tempo. Chi resta focalizzato comunica implicitamente competenza. Come un navigatore esperto che sa dove sta andando. Ed è esattamente questo che le persone cercano: qualcuno che non salti costantemente da un'idea brillante all'altra, ma che scenda in profondità.La praticaAttenzione: curation non significa ripostare link. Curation significa usare formati che dimostrano competenza senza richiedere scrittura classica.Qui trovi 7 formati di contenuti curati, testati, pratici, adatti anche a chi non si sente scrittore. Ogni formato richiede si del tempo per essere creato, ma poi continua a creare valore man mano che il tempo passa. Perché la curation è come una pianta. Va curata, aggiornata, mantenuta. Ed è proprio questo che la rende così potente.1. Directory di StrumentiUna lista curata di 10–20 risorse utili in una nicchia specifica. Breve descrizione per ciascuna.Aggiornata nel tempo. Esempi:Content Finder ToolkitT5 - zero-cost tools for indie entrepreneurs 2. Expert RoundupInvii 3–5 domande a 7–10 esperti. CurI le risposte in guide tematiche. Aggiungi introduzione, analisi e punto di vista personale. Esempi:Most Creators Are Preparing For AI WrongPredictions for Journalism 2026Are AI-generated Images Theft?3. NewsradarUna selezione periodica delle notizie più rilevanti in una nicchia. Con contesto e spiegazione del perché contano. Esempi:This Week in Social4. Learning PathUn percorso guidato di contenuti per imparare qualcosa passo dopo passo. Articoli, video, podcast, ricerche. 5. Raccolta di casi di successoUna libreria di esempi reali. Progetti, persone, strategie che funzionano.6. Best Of Il meglio del meglio su un tema specifico.Non tutto. Solo ciò che vale davvero.7. Pattern LibraryUna raccolta di schemi ricorrenti. Modelli che si ripetono nel tempo. Utilissima per chi vuole capire, non solo imitare.Il punto chiave è: Non serve essere uno scrittore. Serve essere qualcuno che sa vedere, scegliere e mettere in relazione le cose. La fiducia oggi non nasce da chi parla di più. Nasce da chi aiuta gli altri a orientarsi. In un mondo pieno di idee e possibili direzioni, chi disegna mappe diventa una guida.-----------------------Articolo originale (in Inglese) - "✪ The Non-Writer's Authority System: Stop Writing, Start Curating - #62"_______________Info Utili• Sostieni questo podcast:Entra in contatto con me, ottieni feedback, ricevi consigli sul tuo progetto onlinehttps://Patreon.com/Robin_Good•  Musica di questa puntata:"Prismatic" by Birocratic•  Nella foto di copertina:La mano della mia assistente-coloratrice Trilly mentre dipinge il tetto della mia casetta su uno dei mieiscarabocchi creativi - Isola di Terceira, 2018• Ascolta e condividi questo podcast:https://www.spreaker.com/show/dabrandafriend• Archivio del podcast organizzato per temi:https://start.me/p/kxENzk/da-brand-a-friend-archivio-podcast• Seguimi su Telegram:https://t.me/RobinGoodItalia• Instagram channelMomenti di vita non in posa - cosa vedono i miei occhi:https://instagram.com/giggi_canali • Newsletter in Inglese:https://robingood.substack.comFuoco su costruire fiducia per chi fa l'imprenditore online. 

Week 39 of Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities Course takes on nineteenth-century American literature—and to my surprise, it became one of the most enjoyable weeks so far. I went in dreading familiar names and old high-school resentments, but came out newly energized. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (chapters 1–6) was funny, humane, and immediately engaging. Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and “The Raven” used ornate language to heighten unease, while Emily Dickinson's poems felt weightless and startlingly modern. Henry David Thoreau's Walden was quotable and provocative, if ultimately grating, and Herman Melville surprised me most of all: Bartleby, the Scrivener lingered with quiet power, and the opening of Moby-Dick left me eager for more. This week revealed a real shift in voice and sensibility—and changed my mind about American literature. I'm looking forward to going back and reading more, but first we need to move on to Week 40 and Russian Literature!

Week 38 of Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities Course pairs two seemingly unrelated works: Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (chapters 1–4) and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. What initially felt random turned out to be an enlightening combination! Darwin's early chapters focus not on sweeping conclusions but on careful observation—natural selection as a real, ongoing process, and the frustratingly blurry boundary between “species” and “variety.” His meticulous attention to detail is both humbling and persuasive, even if the book's once-shocking claims now feel familiar. Mill's On Liberty complements Darwin perfectly by arguing that truth itself depends on open discussion. A society, Mill insists, produces great individuals only when it protects freedom of thought and speech and resists dogma. Read together, these works reveal how revolutionary ideas require not just insight, but a culture willing to debate, question, and change. This week left a lasting impression—and a renewed appreciation for intellectual humility and openness.We have a special Christmas Episode next week--be sure to check in!LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

This week on Crack the Book, we dive into a fascinating mix of political and philosophical texts from Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities List: the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Communist Manifesto, and Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women.I revisit the Declaration with fresh eyes—its sharp list of grievances and its insistence on mutual respect still sparkle with clarity. The Constitution, shorter than I expected, impressed me with how firmly it centers the individual while still designing a workable government.From there we move to Marx and Engels, whose Manifesto frames history as a struggle between classes and calls for radical redistribution of power. Finally, I explore Wollstonecraft's early feminist argument for women's education and its importance for society's progress.Next week: a palate-cleansing turn to Jane Austen. Join me!LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)The Preamble, in case you need a refresher!CONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

Ted Gioia warned this would be a tough week—and he wasn't kidding. Week 33 of the Immersive Humanities Project had me wrestling with three giants of philosophy: Descartes, Kant, and Spinoza. I started with Descartes' Discourse on the Method, where his famous “I think, therefore I am” felt surprisingly direct and human. His four rules for reasoning—question, divide, simplify, and review—made him seem less like an abstract philosopher and more like a kind, curious friend.Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals was another story. Dense and demanding, it centers on the “Categorical Imperative”: act only according to principles you'd accept as universal law. It's a moral system built purely on duty, not emotion.Then came Spinoza's Ethics, written like a geometry proof. His radical idea—that God and Nature are one—left little room for the supernatural or free will.When reading failed, I turned to the 1987 Great Philosophers series with Brian Magee, which unlocked everything. These thinkers—Continental Rationalists all—believed reason alone could uncover truth, unlike the British Empiricists who demanded evidence. It was a mentally exhausting but fascinating stretch, and next week I'm relieved to return to fiction with Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

After three (very full!) weeks of Shakespeare, we reluctantly leave England for Italy—and step into the vivid world of Renaissance art. Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities List serves up a refreshing change of scene with Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists and Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography.Both were brand-new to me, and both were a delight. Vasari, himself an accomplished painter and architect, profiles the greats—Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo—not as remote geniuses but as human beings: witty, flawed, brilliant, and endlessly ambitious. His writing reminded me of Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars—a chronicle of greatness, but with warmth instead of gossip. Vasari captures not just the artists but the culture that shaped them: a world where beauty was power, art was currency, and patrons competed to prove their taste and influence.Each artist glows in Vasari's telling. Giotto, kind and devoted to the Church; Botticelli, charming and hopeless with money; Leonardo, the restless perfectionist who could give a lizard wings; Raphael, the graceful imitator who died too young; Michelangelo, the divine genius who could never quite trust the world that adored him. Reading Lives left me wondering how Florence could possibly have produced so many masters at once—and wishing we could live, just for a moment, in a world that valued art that deeply.Then came Benvenuto Cellini, the goldsmith, sculptor, and self-styled rogue whose Autobiography reads like an adventure novel. He's talented, impulsive, funny, and so honest that you can't help but like him. Cellini's stories—his fiery temper, his father's musical ambitions, his devotion to Michelangelo—make the Renaissance feel wonderfully alive.This week's title, “True Colors,” fits perfectly. Vasari and Cellini reveal the true colors of art and ambition—divine inspiration, human pride, and all the messy brilliance in between.This is a year-long challenge! Join me next week for Cervantes and Molière.LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)All the video links are available in this Substack PostCONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate -

My very dear friend Lisa Beerman joins me for this episode, and we talk all things Purgatory. Since we share a deep love for this book of the Divine Comedy she's our perfect companion for this part of the journey.We have a wide ranging conversation about translations, "ways in" to the Comedy, and the usefulness of Dante in everyday life. I hope you enjoy this conversation! Links to a few of the resources we discussed are below.We left Dante and Virgil climbing down Lucifer's frozen body—and suddenly what was down is now up. They emerge at the base of Mt. Purgatory and climb past shades until reaching its gates in Canto 9, just a quarter of the way into the book. From there, the journey ascends through purgation, penance, and eventual joy. At the summit, Virgil departs, and Beatrice steps in as Dante's new guide, leading him into the spheres of Paradise and toward the Highest Heaven.Reading Purgatory quickly has given me a fresh perspective. Unlike Hell's hostility, the shades here are eager to talk with Dante, sometimes asking for prayers, sometimes simply glad to meet him. Light is everywhere—Dante's shadow a reminder of the sun, not the flames of Hell. Each sin is purged through fitting penance: the proud bowed low under heavy stones, the slothful running ceaselessly, each step of the mountain carved with examples of virtue--carvings that move!One highlight: the poet Statius meeting Virgil through Dante's introduction. One heartbreak: Virgil's final farewell.If you missed the first episode about the Divine Comedy, check out "Week 24" for a discussion of Inferno and Dante's Nuovo Vitae. Next week we finish in Paradise with another guest and Crack-the-Book frequent flyer, my son Jack!This is a year-long reading list from Ted Gioia and his Honest Broker Substack. This is Part 1 of Week 25.LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)Robin Fitzpatrick's Divine Comedy translation100 Days of DanteCONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

This week marks the halfway point in my year-long reading project through Ted Gioia's *Immersive Humanities* list, and instead of turning to Dante just yet, I'm stopping to take stock. Call it my “halftime report.”When Gioia built his list, he gave himself some rules: keep each week under 250 pages, make it global not just Western, mix in art and music, and move (mostly) in chronological order. I've tried to follow his structure, but I've also set some rules of my own: stick to the weekly schedule, read hard copies whenever possible, take notes faithfully, and—my personal favorite—skip the introductions until after finishing the book. These boundaries have kept me grounded and helped me push through the tough weeks.Along the way I've discovered a few key tools that make this project work. “Warm-ups” like short lyric poetry before longer epics have been surprisingly helpful in easing into a big text. Good translations (thank you, Penguin Classics) have been essential, while flashy but unreadable editions only get in the way. Writing in my books, flagging footnotes, and taking notes have become indispensable habits. And yes, the occasional YouTube lecture has saved me when I got stuck—no shame in that.There have been highs: falling in love with epic poetry, discovering Boethius' *Consolation of Philosophy* with my son, and realizing Aristotle's *Ethics* was hard but worth it. There have also been lows: weeks that felt too open-ended, a disappointing second half of *Confessions*, and the frustration of wanting more time to chase connections between authors. But even the “hate-reads” (looking at you, Mwindo Epic) have taught me something: knowing why you dislike a book can be as valuable as knowing why you love one.Most of all, I've learned that this project has changed how I read. I'm less afraid of poetry, drama, or “hard books.” I've discovered that reading fast has its place, that writing alongside an author can deepen the experience, and that I actually thrive on having a big, purposeful challenge in front of me.So here I am halfway through, still going strong, and more convinced than ever that the classics have something to offer ordinary readers like you and me. Next week we begin Dante, and I can't wait. This is a year-long challenge! LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

This week on The Professional Noticer, Andy holds a discussion with YOU.   Tune in to hear Andy's take on an article from one of his favorite writers, “The Honest Broker,” Ted Gioia. The article dissects a dangerous aspect to Artificial Intelligence and Andy seems to agree. When you hear what NPR, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal have reported, will you decide “no big deal?” Or will you be as disturbed as Andy? See if you can discern the truth in this shocking episode. Follow Ted's "The Honest Broker" on Substack: https://www.honest-broker.com/

I try not to write about Substack itself on Substack too often—I know it can feel a bit too meta. But as a writer in this space, I'm invested in how the platform evolves, especially as more writers are finding both a community and livelihood here. At a time when authors' salaries are shrinking, AI technologies are rapidly advancing, and many people I care about in publishing are being made redundant, it's hard to ignore how much the landscape is shifting.Yesterday, I was offered some interview time with the co-founders of Substack Hamish McKenzie and Chris Best. I don't interview many people these days—it's been years since I swapped my podcasting and journalism work to focus on writing more fiction and nonfiction books—but Substack is an interesting place, and they had some news to share.Today, Substack announced $100 million in new funding. I don't know much about the running of big companies—I'm a solo worker, and I like it that way—but I've always assumed big investment means big targets and more pressure. Still, this feels like a turning point for the platform. Clearly they're aiming to go big or go home. During the interview, I kept my focus simple: What does this mean for us writers?In their blog post today: they assure us that they want to help people build “livelihoods based on trust, quality, and creative freedom.” They want to help us protect our “independence, amplify [our] voices, and foster deep and direct relationships.”I asked them some direct questions: What do you do with $100 million investment? How do you plan to grow? What lessons are you taking from what went wrong at Twitter (X)? Are Notes cannibalizing the Substack newsletter model? And ultimately—what are you hoping to achieve longterm? How will you help writers and artists make their stuff and get paid?There are plenty of writers who are more interested in the business side of things than me and will continue to watch it all unfold—I just want to use this platform to write and live my quiet, happy life. But I'm glad I had the chance to have this conversation and share it with you, because I care deeply about the empowerment of writers and artists—and right now, we're in the middle of something pretty exciting. Hope you enjoy the interview! Big thanks to Hamish and Chris for their time xoxoInterviewing the co-founders of Substack, Hamish McKenzie and Chris Best:EMMA GANNON: First of all, I want to say thank you, because, you know, the media industry was quite demoralising before you guys came along. CHRIS BEST: Thanks, and thank you for using Substack.EMMA: Never a dull day in your offices. On that note, you've got some quite big news.CHRIS: Yeah, we're announcing $100 million in Series C funding led by investors at Bond and The Chernin Group with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and Rich Paul. You know who Rich Paul is? The CEO of Klutch Sports Group.EMMA: As in, Adele's Rich Paul? I saw her in Las Vegas last year, and then went deep into Google. CHRIS: Funny the many different paths to knowing who Rich Paul is. Also Jens Grede who's the CEO co-founder of SKIMS, and Mood Rowghani from BOND is joining the board. Basically, we're just thrilled. It's very exciting. There's something kind of special happening on Substack. We're building the plumbing for it. We're building the tools, technology and network and the bits that enable it, but it's really sort of you and everybody that's using the platform that's willing this thing into the world. Now we have this massive set of resources to make this thing the biggest and best version that it can possibly be.EMMA: Lots of people who follow my newsletter are solo entrepreneurs. They don't have teams, they don't necessarily have targets, they don't build the platforms but want to make things. For you, what happens next? Where do you put the money? I'm assuming you hire more people and make a better platform?CHRIS: Yeah, this gives us a chance to look really long term at what the biggest and best version of this thing that we're building can be. To build a company that can move fast enough and well enough to realise the biggest version of that. And so it means investing in the teams who are building the tools, building the network, helping writers and creators succeed.EMMA: What about learnings from other tech companies and learning from the past? In 2013, I was in Twitter HQ in London with my little mug with the bird on, and having an amazing time. And, well, we all know what happened to that. I was so sad about the decline of a great place. Do you keep that in mind? All of the stuff that other social networks got wrong?CHRIS: Yeah, we try to learn from what other people have done. We've learned what other people have got wrong and what other people have got right. You know, one of our core theories we have at Substack is, ultimately, you want to have a business model that's aligned with the values of what you're building. We make money when writers and creators on Substack make money. They make money when they're doing the work they believe in. I think that's maybe one of the most important lessons we've taken from some of the first generation social networks: they had these really lofty ambitions (and in many cases, quite good goals) but then wound up with these business models, which, on the one hand, were massively successful, but on the other hand, kind of pulled against the interests of the human beings who are using the networks.EMMA: How do you maintain that human element that makes everything so special at the beginning, when something grows? Because on one hand, it's like, I want everyone to know what Substack is, and on the other hand, it's like the cool band that I feel like I discovered, and I don't want people to come in and dilute it!CHRIS: We're trying to make something that is, essentially, a positive sum game. Some people have this feeling like, oh, man, if some well known person comes to Substack, or somebody else on Substack is really succeeding, that must be taking away from me, because there's this limited set of attention and money and universe. I think people (especially coming from from media over the past few decades) have this feeling of like, Alright, there's a declining share of resources, and I need to grab my piece of it. But the thing that I think is special about Substack is that it's positive, right? As more people come in, more people participate. It's this pie that's actually growing, and the more that it grows, the more benefit it can throw off for everybody. HAMISH MCKENZIE: And the better the pie tastes. It's not just a crappy pie, it's gonna be a delicious, nutritious pie.CHRIS: And it can't be just for cool people. It can't just be for any sort of one group. Not for Substack to be the place that's like, Oh, this is where the cool literary scene is, or this is where the in the know politics people hang out, or this is where the musicians are making something interesting, but rather, for us to build a platform that has enough structure that all those spaces can exist.EMMA: Yeah, that's so well put. I love that. Because even though I'm sure there is a small top percentage of people earning the most on Substack, wouldn't it be amazing if there is the ability for everyone to maybe have a lovely income stream through Substack, if they want to?CHRIS: Yeah. I mean, you want the tools to take payments, and then you want to be able to grow. We sometimes joke that the product proposition for Substack is, we'll do everything for you, except the hard part.EMMA: The hard part as in coming up with the ideas?CHRIS: Making the creative work that is actually valuable.EMMA: It's also the joyful part.CHRIS: We want to make like a machine that makes everything else magically work.EMMA: The recommendations network within Substack is the best thing. I talk about it all the time. So many of my new readers come from the inner network of Substack, and that's incredible. I have noticed a little bit of a plateau though. I know things can't grow like crazy forever. Are you working on more tools to foster this growth within the Substack eco-system?CHRIS: This is a huge focus for us. This is why the Substack app is a crucial part of the strategy. We think a lot about not just the volume of growth, but the quality of growth. Like, are you getting subscribers that are going to want to read you? Are you getting subscribers that want to pay? You know, the core of the Substack is really the value of that subscription relationship. EMMA: I do love the app, but I also want to make sure that I write and I sit at my desk and I think about things deeply. And I want to sit at my desk and write, and think about the world. On the app, sometimes I do end up mindlessly scrolling, and I'm like, ‘Oh, this is what I wanted to escape from on other social media.' Do you think Notes takes attention away from the deeper essays or long reads that we want to read?CHRIS: You know, originally the Substack app was just a quiet reader app. Instead of reading things in your inbox, you can read them in this quiet, nice space. That was kind of like a cool tool. But what it didn't do is help you discover new things, and it didn't help you grow. It just meant that you had to go to other places, like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, and you were sort of dependent on these other networks to actually fill that need of discovering and reaching out and being part of the discourse. So the real advantage of the Substack Notes feed, is: we want to make something that's fun and engaging, that you actually want to go to and spend some time on—but so that you discover things that you fall in love with, enough that you might want to pay for them.EMMA: I love following you on Notes and what you're up to. You also get so many people being like “add this/do this/change this.” Is it cool to be in a position now where you've got, like, a shopping list of things to upgrade?HAMISH: Yeah, our build list is just going to be determined by the things that people tag us about in Notes. [laughs]EMMA: It must be annoying. [laughs]CHRIS: Well, I always appreciate getting feedback, and I always appreciate people telling us what they're feeling and how it's working. I will say that lobbying for things on Notes is not effective.EMMA: That's a good tip. Is there anything that you're excited about personally right now? To do with Substack?CHRIS: There are lots of things. One thing is this Live product that we've been building. The idea of the Live product is I can have something that basically feels like a FaceTime call. It's as simple as just calling somebody up, but it magically turns into a collaborative Live moment where we can both grow and then have a longform podcast artefact that can go in a podcast app or on YouTube. HAMISH: I'm really excited about the development of this network that is now established. It's not the largest network on the internet, but it's established, and it's growing, and it has so much potential, that could serve as the core for an entirely new cultural ecosystem (a challenger to the ones that have dominated for the last 10 years). We had high hopes for them, but they've ended up—in most cases—disappointing us or dividing us. And so that this is now established, and we get a ton of resources now to go and recruit more and more people to this revolution. That is thrilling to me.EMMA: At the Substack summer party in London, I looked around and it was full of TV presenters and radio DJs and documentary makers and authors, these amazing people. And I think it was Ted Gioia who said “the talent base of Substack is the impressive thing”. Do you want to focus on that retention of these types of people on the platform?CHRIS: Yes, it's very exciting when established names come to Substack, but it's also very exciting when a new generation of people can make those names for themselves and get their start. You know, who did not come from having some famous media job or having some being a bestselling author. If you're a young person right now who has the ambition to make something great, I think it would be very easy to look at the world and think: how can I find my way into that (media) world? EMMA: I think that's so true, and that's why the engine that you're building is so important, because we all know the feeling of starting something and then it's just in a vacuum. No one sees it, no one's engaging with it. So yeah, I love that you're focusing on making things discoverable for people. HAMISH: Yeah, that's the game. That's the game we're trying to play here. Bring people together, convene about culture, and then help them find each other.EMMA: I saw the Airmail piece about Sophia and Matt in your events team — it very cool, very chic — essentially profiling members of your team. It's basically saying “this is the cool place to be”. I love that Substack do events, is that something you want to continue doing?HAMISH: I think representing the Substack culture and values in the real world, as well as just on the internet (not that the internet's not the real world), but having a place where people come together and enjoy culture together and have these meaningful shared experiences, there's very much a continuation of the ethos that lies at the heart of the platform. Sophia Efthimiatou and Matt Starr (who have been responsible for the incredible events a large number of them, at least in New York) in particular embody the spirit of people who really value culture.EMMA: I sense a deep rooted motivation from you both, I always have, from the start, that this platform feels slightly different. There's an integrity and a really great energy. What is your ultimate goal for Substack? Is it just to continue on being a great place, or do you have a specific moment that you are hoping to reach in the next few years?CHRIS: I think we're living through a period of profound change right now. I think there's new technology coming online that's changing everything. I think there is social and cultural and geopolitical change, and those things come with problems and peril. You know, when you have massive technological shifts, there's always downsides, there's always things that come up, but there are also massive opportunity. I think of it as like building the plumbing that enables a renaissance. We want to build a successful, independent company that can power that thing to be the biggest and best version of itself.HAMISH: It's not about a particular moment. Just every day that the network gets bigger and better and then more and more people can succeed as a result is a next celebration for us. This is a long term work in progress where we're not looking for a specific business outcome or a specific even ecosystem outcome. It is a living and breathing culture.EMMA: Thanks so much for your time. I feel very invigorated at the moment, and a large part of that is the empowerment I feel to be paid for my work in such a direct way via Substack. As much as I love being traditionally published as a writer, I think one day I'm going to look back and think it is kind of crazy that I have to go into a building to record an audiobook, be ‘picked' as a person that's allowed to do that, and then be paid money in royalties. I don't think we're quite grasping how revolutionary life is for writers/creators right now. I hope you have a good week and look forward to seeing you again soon.HAMISH. Thank you, Emma. Thanks for showing the way for others as well. You're a huge leader on the Substack platform and an advocate for a different way of thinking about things. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thehyphen.substack.com/subscribe

This week, we take on Apuleius' The Golden Ass, a hilarious surprise from Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities Course. Written in the mid-300s A.D., this is the very first Latin prose novel, penned by Algerian-born Apuleius. Lucius, our hero, is a young man who meddles in magic, transforms into a donkey, and embarks on wild adventures before returning to human form. We were so captivated that note-taking fell by the wayside, much like with Herodotus' Histories. This rollicking tale, brimming with late-Roman-Empire themes, proved both hilarious and profound.Unlike Aristotle's structured tragedy guidelines (see Week 5's Poetics), The Golden Ass defies unity of action, place, and time, weaving a tapestry of digressions and sub-stories. Lucius' transformation serves as a spine for tales like “I heard…” or “So they told me…,” echoing the nested narratives of The Odyssey and The Aeneid. The standout sub-story is the myth of Cupid and Psyche, the earliest known version, which stunned us as the inspiration for C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces. Its late appearance for a myth feels significant, reflecting a decadent, fatigued Roman worldview. Fortune, personified as in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, reappears, underscoring this era's preoccupations.Sarah Ruden's translation is a triumph, preserving Apuleius' puns, alliteration, and bawdy humor. This farce, second only to Lysistrata in humor, is delightfully NSFW, with outrageous scenes that shocked even our son Jack. Ruden notes comparisons to modern humorists like Wodehouse or George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series, and we see parallels to Forrest Gump—Lucius stumbles through events without driving the plot. The book's influence extends to A Confederacy of Dunces, sparking new reading threads for us, exactly why we joined this course.We paired this with Scott Joplin's ragtime, evoking The Sting's lively vibe. Initially, the rags blended together, but subtle differences, like occasional piano percussion, emerged over time, enriching our listening. Next week, we continue with more narrative, music, and art, including Vincent van Gogh's works, in this eclectic journey. Join us next week as we travel east and read The Arabian Nights.LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)O Brother Where Art ThouCirceRagtime (The Sting, YouTube)Young Gun Silver FoxTed's "New" Yacht Rock postCONNECTTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify -

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.Before we start, though, we talk about graduation speeches...and share the graduation speech we wish we'd heard.Next, we journey from Western literature back to ancient China to explore two timeless texts: Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (c. 500 B.C.) and Sun Tzu's The Art of War (c. 400 B.C.), roughly contemporary with Confucius and Plato. After a lukewarm experience with Confucius' Analects in Week 4, we adjusted our approach to these aphoristic works, splitting each into five parts and interleaving them daily. While this didn't make reading easier, it encouraged comparisons between the two.The Tao Te Ching offers a serene philosophy of “the Way,” advocating a life of detachment and flow, like a leaf on a stream. Key insights include prioritizing essence over form (e.g., the space within walls over the walls themselves), embracing hands-off leadership, and avoiding rules or weapons that may incite vice or war. But it's passive: retreating rather than advancing in the face of evil feels challenging, especially compared to active resistance like Gandhi's. The Tao's detachment felt isolating, distinct from the interconnected self-emptying of the Dhammapada or Boethius' Christian-Stoic blend.In contrast, The Art of War is a ruthless manual of military strategy. Sun Tzu, who famously beheaded two concubines to prove his methods to King Ho Lu, emphasizes deception, swift victory, and avoiding prolonged conflict. Key takeaways: defensive measures prevent defeat but don't ensure victory; desperate soldiers fight hardest; and spies are a humane, cost-effective tool. We ponder the status of Sun's soldiers (free or enslaved?), recalling Herodotus' Spartan-Persian debates on free men's ferocity. The texts seem to clash: the Tao's passivity versus Sun's calculated control, though Sun's strategic setups might align with the Tao's inevitable flow.We noted a cultural contrast: Chinese texts lack the narrative epics of Western heroes like Odysseus or Gilgamesh, hinting at differing worldviews. Unlike Confucius' moral focus, neither text emphasizes goodness, which surprised us. Our Tao edition (Stephen Miller's) felt overly modernized, while our unannotated Art of War was dry but tactically insightful, especially for business or military studies. Pairing it with Herodotus or Machiavelli could be illuminating.Don't skip the music! Three albums each from the Beatles and The Rolling Stones...when was the last time you listened to one all the way through?Next week, we return to narrative with Apuleius' Golden Ass, explore Scott Joplin's ragtime, and admire van Gogh's art. LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts -

In this episode of Crack the Book, we take a look at Week Fourteen of Ted Gioia's Humanities Course, covering Virgil's The Aeneid (Books 1–2), Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book 1), and selections from The Portable Roman Reader. The focus is on key texts from Roman literature, their historical context, and their connections to earlier Greek works, providing an overview of their content and significance.Key Discussion Points: Virgil's The Aeneid (Robert Fagles' Translation): Written between 29–19 BCE, The Aeneid serves as Rome's foundational epic, modeled on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Book 1 opens with Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, shipwrecked on Carthage's shore due to Juno's interference, meeting Queen Dido, an exile from Tyre. Book 2 recounts Troy's fall, including the Trojan Horse stratagem and Aeneas' escape with his father Anchises and son Ascanius, losing his wife Creusa. The text emphasizes Aeneas' pietas (duty to gods, family, state). Divine rivalries, notably Juno's grudge from the Judgment of Paris and Venus' protection of Aeneas, drive the narrative. The Fagles translation includes maps and a glossary for accessibility. Ovid's Metamorphoses (David Raeburn's Translation): Composed around 8 CE, Metamorphoses is a 15-book poem chronicling transformations from creation to Ovid's era. Book 1 covers the creation of the cosmos from Chaos, the division into four elements (fire, water, earth, air), and humanity's decline from the Golden to Iron Age. It includes a flood narrative with Deucalion and Pyrrha and the story of Io, transformed into a cow by Jupiter to evade Juno. The Raeburn edition organizes vignettes with titled sections for clarity. The Portable Roman Reader (Basil Davenport, Ed.): Published in 1951, this anthology includes poetry from Rome's Republic, Augustan, and later Empire periods. Catullus (c. 60s–50s BCE) offers direct, personal verses, translated by Byron. Horace (65–8 BCE) writes complex, philosophical odes, less accessible due to style. Martial (c. 38–104 CE) provides epigrams on public life, including two elegies for a deceased young girl. Davenport's notes contextualize each era, and the anthology features prose by Livy, Caesar, and Tacitus for future study. Contextual Notes: The texts reflect Rome's engagement with Greek literary traditions, adapting gods' names (e.g., Hera to Juno) and themes. The course's schedule prioritizes rapid coverage to identify key works and connections.Takeaways:I loved this week so much! It felt great to come "home" to Rome. I've got specific ideas about how to approach each of these books, but in my opinion they are all worth the time for certain people. The music was gorgeous, arias and overtures from Puccini and Verdi! You must listen...check out my link below. And the cave paintings were worth examining as well, especially the handprints from Indonesia. See that link below, too.This is a year-long challenge! Join me next week for WHATEVER IS NEXTLINKSTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)Spotify Play List of Puccini and Verdi without wordsCave...

The jazz standard "All The Things You Are" has been performed countless times by master jazz vocalists, 30s big bands, bebop small groups, hard-bop combos, modern deconstructionists, and even soon-to-be Kings of Pop. On this episode, Kirk takes listeners through the history of the now-famous tune, from its humble Broadway origins all the way to his recording studio in Portland, where he and some friends recorded an all-new arrangement just for Strong Songs.Music/Lyrics: Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein IIVersions Featured:Broadway Original Cast Recording of "Very Warm for May," - 1939Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, feat. Jack Leonard, 1939Artie Shaw w/ Hellen Forrest, 1939Dizzy Gillespie w/ Charlie Parker, 1945Johnny Griffin w/ Hank Mobley, John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Art Blakey on A Blowing Session, 1957Ella Fitzgerald from Sings the Jerome Kern Songbook, 1963Michael Jackson, 1973Sonny Rollins w/ Coleman Hawkins from Sonny Meets Hawk!, 1963Bill Evans w/ Chuck Israels, bass, and Larry Bunker, drums at Shelly's Mane-Hole, 1963Keith Jarrett Trio, from Standards, Vol.1, 1983Brad Mehldau Trio, from Art of the Trio 4, 1999Jim Hall & Pat Metheney, 1999Strong Songs Version Featuring:Kirk Hamilton, tenor saxAndrew Oliver, keyboardScott Pemberton, guitarSam Howard, bassTyson Stubelek, drumsThe "All The Things You Are" Playlist:Spotify | Apple | YouTube MusicALSO REFERENCED/DISCUSSED:The Jazz Standards: A Guide To The Repertoire by Ted Gioia, 2012The terrific 99% Invisible episode about The Real Book“Autumn Leaves” by Joseph Kosma as recorded by Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis on Somethin' Else, 1958“Pennies From Heaven” by Johnston and Burke, recorded by Stan Getz with the Oscar Peterson Trio, 1957“Bye Bye Blackbird” by Henderson/Dixon, recorded by Miles Davis on ‘Round About Midnight, 1957“All Of Me” by Marks and Simons, played by Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano and Kenny Clarke, 1951“I Got Rhythm” by George Gershwin, recorded by Sonny Stitt on The Hard Swing, 1961Rachmaninoff: Prelude in C-Sharp Minor,  performed by Jason Minnis, 2011“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” by Elton John, 1973“Bird of Paradise,” recorded by Charlie Parker w/ Howard McGhee, Tpt. on The Complete Dial Recordings, Feb 1947“Prince Albert” recorded by Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (Mobley, Dorham, Watkins, Silver) live at Cafe Bohemia, 1955“Poinciana” by Simon/Bernier recorded by Amhad Jamal Live At The Pershing, 1958----LINKS-----

Episode OverviewThis week, I consider the Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Epictetus' Enchiridion, part of Ted Gioia's Humanities List (link below!). Moving from Greek dramas to 2nd-century Roman Stoics, we first talk about the move from Greek lit to Roman, how the mindset and history will impact what we read. I cover Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus in depth, mention Admiral Stockdale (a modern Stoic) and end the episode with Rudyard Kipling's poem "If." Marcus Aurelius' MeditationsMeditations, the private journal of a Roman emperor, emphasizes self-focus, humility, and inner peace. Key takeaways include: Focus on your own mind and skills, not others' actions or opinions. Embrace nature to cultivate curiosity and appreciation for the world. Accept life's brevity and smallness, acting virtuously without expecting rewards. Find peace within, not in external escapes like vacation homes. Hold pleasures loosely to achieve contentment in the present moment.I note the surprising modernity of Aurelius' advice but question its contradictions, like the futility of life versus the call to virtue.Epictetus' EnchiridionEpictetus, a former slave turned philosopher, offers a direct, practical guide in The Enchiridion. I prefer Epictetus' straightforward style, finding it more relatable than Aurelius' introspections. Highlights include: Distinguish what harms the body from what affects the will—Epictetus' own lameness adds poignancy to this teaching. Know your limits and operate fully within them, committing wholeheartedly to your purpose. Avoid excess in speech, laughter, or indulgence, embracing simplicity.Consider the parallels to Biblical teachings like Colossians 3:17.Reflections and ChallengesI don't love Stoicism, as I think it sacrifices deep love and beauty. But there's no doubt that its ideals have a place in society--Stockdale and Kipling both reflect that. Translation struggles (George Long's arcane 1877 version versus Gregory Hays' readable Meditations) and time management issues due to travel delayed this week's reading. Classical music (Haydn's Symphonies 45, 94, and 104) enriched the experience, though I skipped the art.What's NextNext week, I explore Suetonius' Twelve Caesars with Mozart's symphonies and Italian art by Botticelli and Caravaggio. Subscribe to follow the journey! LINKSTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)Haydn's Surprise SymphonyAdmiral James StockdaleSpencer Klavan (Modern Classicist)CONNECTTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify -

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.Reading a familiar text in a bigger reading list like this offers its own special challenges. I start with a little insight about what to do when that happens.I think the best way to talk about these very familiar books is to take them one at a time. Then I have some thoughts about translations (again) and reading in general. Genesis: This is a much longer book than you think! The story starts out very broad and then narrows to tell how God decides to work through a man named Abram. We then see how God continues to work through now-Abraham's family, through Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. None of these men are perfect, or even very heroic except possibly Joseph, but God uses them anyway. Genesis is different than the other very old texts (religious and otherwise) we've read in this schedule, and it's certainly quite different than the Greek philosophy. We see a God who is personal and emotional, capable of anger and also great love, and who is both all-powerful and yet interested in every individual in the entire world.Ecclesiastes: This is a poem of sorts, and you definitely know part of it because of the Byrds' “Turn Turn Turn.” The main character, the Preacher (likely King Solomon), reflects at the end of his days on “What's it all for?” He never settles on a real answer but reflects on how to live, so in its themes it is a lot more like Plato or Aristotle. It's not didactic like Confucius' Analects. It feels a lot more like the Dhammapada, but less fatalistic and actually lovelier in its construction. I think the weariness of Ecclesiastes speaks to the human condition, common across time and geography.Matthew: The first Gospel opens with Jesus' genealogy through Joseph, and I think Matthew's emphasis as he relates the story of Jesus' life is on the fact that the very people who should have been most willing to hear the message did not. Matthew is rooted in Jewish scripture, continually quoting prophets as he relates Jesus' ministry. The book starts with three chapters known as the Sermon on the Mount, which is harder to read straight through than I expected. It is a lot of sayings and aphorisms, not a lot of story, and you know by now how I feel about that. The book then moves into more narrative as the miracles increase in type and scope, leading to the crucifixion. The teachings from Jesus and Matthew's own writing are aimed squarely at the Jewish leaders here, pointing out what they are missing and their refusal to see Jesus for who he is.Mark: This is the shortest Gospel, and I also think of it as the “immediately” Gospel. Mark uses that word at almost every transition from one scene to another, and it makes the book feel very action-oriented. I felt like Mark was sitting with me saying, “Let me tell you what happened!”Luke: Luke is not an eyewitness at all, and even opens the book up saying he has talked to lots of people so he can get an accurate history put down. Luke's always been my favorite for a variety of reasons...John: But I was wrong. John is the single best piece of writing I have read so far in this program. It is amazing. The entire book is crafted beautifully, and it's now my favorite Gospel. Also, it has the very best ending you could hope for. Read it.Romans: Okay, full disclosure, my Bible study group is doing Romans this year, walking slowly through Paul's longest letter. Coming to Romans after the previous readings, I was absolutely struck by the vigor of Paul's writing. It's energetic, masculine, wide-ranging and urgent. It is deeply personal in a way that none of the previous readings were. I loved reading it in one big chunk and offer reflections on how...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.Ted listed SIX Greek dramas for this week: Bacchae (Euripides), Lysistrata (Aristophanes), Agamemnon (Aeschylus), and the three Theban plays from Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Oedipus in Colonus and Antigone. We discuss how to read drama in general. I tried to read a little bit of background on each play before I dove in. One thing that's easy to forget with Greek drama is that the audience didn't have any spoilers; they knew all of these stories really well. They were there to see HOW it came together. That meant that some of the plot gets treated with shorthand in some ways. I tried to figure out the major players, and how they might have interacted with characters I had met elsewhere. It's astonishing how all of these characters are connected by one or two degrees of separation. Bill and I joke that it feels exactly like when we moved to Charleston a couple of years ago. I swear that every person we meet knows someone else we know through one or two people. It's the strangest thing, and Greek drama is exactly like that.I also flag my books like crazy: one flag for the cast of characters; one for the endnotes; one for a map, even if it's in a different book. As a matter of fact, my Fagles translation of the Odyssey came in handy this week. Not only are there some great maps, there is also a glossary of all the proper names in the Odyssey. Many, many of the characters I came across this week also put in an appearance in the Odyssey.Finally, I kept a brief “plot summary” of each play as I read. Only Bacchae was divided into scenes, but for each play I tried to keep a brief synopsis of the action as I read. This kept me from mixing up characters too much, and also it helped me to get an idea of how the various stories fit together. In addition, I read out loud occasionally, especially if I found myself alone in the house. It's easy to lose the thread of some of these long passages, especially where the chorus has an extended explication of action taking place off stage. Reading out loud helped me capture the rhythm of the language and also the drama of it in a way that reading silently could never do.I started with Euripedes' Bacchae, translated by Paul Woodruff. To be honest, half the reason I bought this edition was that it had Elvis on the cover as Dionysus! Not long after the founding of Thebes, Dionysus appears to bring his cult to the city. Dionysus is a son of Zeus but also the grandson of the founder of Thebes, Cadmus. Dionysus' cousin Pentheus is now king, and he refuses to acknowledge the god-status of Dionysus. Let's just say Pentheus regretted that decision. This play was shockingly brutal to me, even though all the violence always takes place off-stage in a Greek drama. There are ideas of redemption, and lack of it, woven throughout the play. Bacchae left me curious about anything related to the practice of the cult of Dionysus. Apparently the rites were so secret that nothing, not one thing, survives to help us understand what they did.Next I read Aristophanes' Lysistrata. This is a comedy, truly a farce, whose entire plot revolves around the women of Greece coming together to deny all their men sex so they will quit fighting with each other. It is hilarious, and I'd love to see this one performed live. I love a good marriage quote:“No man can live a happy life unless his wife allows it.”—AristophanesHappily, I bought an edition of Lysistrata that also had three other plays translated by Aaron Poochigian. Clouds, in particular, is a send-up of Socrates and that one is...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.This week's reading was the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Somehow I did not get Ted's recommended translation by Susan Hollis. Instead, I had the gigantic and very, very beautiful reproduction of the complete Papyrus of Ani. This edition had a huge influence on my week "in" Egypt.The Book of the Dead isn't really one book; at the time of its writing (around 1300 BC) it was common to have a papyrus scroll of spells and directions placed in the coffin with the deceased. In this case, the priest Ani had died and this is his scroll. There have been many such scrolls, and pieces of scrolls, found in various tombs across Egypt. Each section of the scroll contains a text that has, for modern purposes, been called a chapter. Many scrolls have many “chapters” in common, but so far no scroll has all of them. On top of that, the chapters can be in any order. The chapters (are they prayers? Spells? Opinions seem split.) are, for the most part, pretty obscure. We spend some time reading excerpts, just to get a sense of them. There really isn't a description of how a person might become “spiritualized” or “pure.” Everything is instruction for the dead in the afterlife.Here are a few more thoughts about this reading. It might seem a little random, but this reading felt a little random, too:Until the Rosetta Stone was found in 1820, the text was completely unknown. The guess was that it was a book of wisdom similar to our Bible. That's actually completely wrong—none of it is oriented toward the living. The text is all about the god Osiris, who was murdered, mourned and buried. Later myths tell of Osiris' resurrection. The vignettes are personalized, in this case for the priest Ani (and his wife Tutu).Burials apparently re-enacted the death of Osiris in ritual form, delivering the deceased to the point of the weighing of the heart. There are prayers to open the deceased's mouth, ears, and eyes in the afterlife, because all of these would be necessary to live there. There is debate whether the myth created the ritual, or did the burial ritual arise first, with the myth developing around it later to explain the actions? It's interesting to me that we can't know based on what the Egyptians left behind.Judgment in the afterlife is the literal weighing of the deceased's heart against a feather! (I would definitely not pass.) The feather is called a ma'at, and is “Truth” or “Rightful Order.” If you are found to have a light heart, you can pass to the good afterlife, the Field of Reeds.The heart is the single most important part of a person, living or dead. It's the engine of the body and the seat of both emotions and intelligence. In the afterlife it was very important not to lose your heart, even though it was now outside of your body thanks to the mummification process.The Egyptians saw death as the confrontation with nonexistence and irrationality. The goal of weight your heart was to travel as an akh, in the sun and in order. The Book of the Dead is a guide to thwart the chaos of the universe, and even the gods had to contend with that disorder.Words, images and reality were a unity in Egyptian thought. The images in the scrolls function as text, and all of it is real. In drawing or writing things, they take on reality. In fact, this was why defacing the name of a king would be regarded as a capital crime; it was no better than assaulting or murdering the king himself.Many gods are represented by animal faces or body parts. Interestingly, this wasn't meant to...

El nuevo entretenimiento: La cultura de la dopaminaEstamos viviendo la cultura de la dopamina. La dopamina es un neurotransmisor clave en el sistema de recompensa del cerebro, responsable de generar sensaciones de placer y motivación. Pero ahora se ha vuelto un problema con la adicción digital. Te explico en este episodio.La cultura de la dopamina detrás de la adicción digitalCuando realizamos actividades gratificantes, como recibir un "me gusta" en redes sociales, se libera dopamina, lo que refuerza ese comportamiento y nos impulsa a repetirlo. En el contexto de las redes sociales, cada notificación, comentario o interacción positiva puede desencadenar una liberación de dopamina, creando un ciclo de retroalimentación que refuerza el uso continuo de estas plataformas. Este mecanismo es similar al que se observa en otras formas de adicción, donde el cerebro busca constantemente estímulos que generen placer. Dice National Geographic que el uso excesivo de redes sociales puede llevar a una sobreestimulación del sistema dopaminérgico, lo que con el tiempo puede resultar en una disminución de la sensibilidad a la dopamina.Esto significa que se necesita una mayor exposición a estos estímulos para alcanzar el mismo nivel de satisfacción, lo que puede conducir a un uso compulsivo y a dificultades para experimentar placer en otras actividades cotidianas. Además, la constante comparación con otros usuarios y la búsqueda de validación en línea pueden afectar negativamente la autoestima y el bienestar emocional, especialmente en adolescentes y jóvenes. La exposición continua a contenidos idealizados puede generar sentimientos de insuficiencia y ansiedad. Cómo salir de la cultura de la dopaminaEstablecer límites de tiempo: Definir períodos específicos para el uso de redes sociales y evitar su uso durante actividades importantes o antes de dormir.Fomentar actividades fuera de línea: Participar en hobbies, ejercicio físico y relaciones interpersonales cara a cara para equilibrar las fuentes de recompensa y satisfacción.Practicar la autorreflexión: Ser consciente de cómo el uso de las redes sociales afecta nuestro estado de ánimo y bienestar general. Considerar pausas digitales: Tomarse descansos periódicos de las redes sociales puede ayudar a restablecer el equilibrio del sistema de recompensa del cerebro y mejorar la salud mental.Si sientes que el uso de las redes sociales está interfiriendo significativamente en tu vida diaria o bienestar emocional, puede ser útil buscar apoyo profesional para desarrollar estrategias personalizadas de manejo y recuperación.Un artículo sobre la cultura de la dopamina para abrir los ojosTed Gioia ha escrito un artículo fantástico de cómo estamos consumiendo el arte y el entretenimiento. Este episodio es un resumen de esa reflexión. No es que las redes sociales o los recursos digitales estén mal. El problema es cómo los estamos usando. Te invito a escuchar el episodio. Y te dejo aquí el artículo original.https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024La Cultura De La Dopamina, Ted Gioia, Redes Sociales, Adicción a Redes Sociales, Adicción Digital, podcast, Podcast Corporativo, Comunicación Organizacional, Recursos Humanos, Desarrollo Profesional, Desarrollo Personal, Comunicación Efectiva, Santiago Ríos, Mil Palabras

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.This week I tackled the Epic of Gilgamesh and also The Dhammapada. Gilgamesh was written in approximately 2000 BC, the oldest known story in the world, and is about 1500 years older than anything I've read to date. The Dhammapada is the oldest writings of the Buddha, from approximately 450 BC, which is a lot more in line with some of the other things I've been reading. I think it's important to note the relative ages of these works and know how they fit together. Gilgamesh was an actual, historical king of a Mesopotamian city called Uruk, around 2750 BC. The poem tells the story of how he angers the gods and then makes a best friend from a former wild man, Enkidu. They go rampaging, killing beasts for the sport of it, and that angers the gods. Enkidu is cursed and falls ill. When he dies, Gilgamesh is heartbroken and goes in search of a cure for his own mortality. He fails in that quest. Here are a few of my take-aways:The style of writing feels extraordinarily primitive to me. There is something very, very basic about the story, and many times it feels like it's written with the mindset of a sixth grade boy: lots of graphic talk about sex and body parts, and lots of bloody killing. Until the last part, there wasn't much nuance and there wasn't a lot of reflection on anyone's part.The Flood story is well-described here, lending credence to an actual, world-changing flood taking place at some point in history. The narrative of it is very interesting, especially the description of a square “boat” constructed and filled with pairs of animals.Book X is much more thoughtful than earlier sections. Gilgamesh is mourning his dead friend, searching for ways that he himself might become immortal. But the only immortal human tells him:Humans are born, they live, then they die, this is the order that the gods have decreed. But until the end comes, enjoy your life, spend it in happiness, not despair. Savor your food, make each of your days a delight, bathe and anoint yourself, wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean, let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace. This is the best way for a man to live.And that's what it comes down to. Man will always and forever struggle with his mortality. We have and we will. The oldest and most enduring story is about the oldest and most enduring question.There is just not a lot of man-woman romance in these old stories. Only Penelope and Odysseus come to mind in the last few weeks. Here, Enkidu is seduced by the temple prostitute but there's not much more mention of women than that. I was actually surprised to see a wife mentioned in the quote above!The Dhammapada reminded me very, very much of The Analects of Confucius (Week 4). Books of aphorisms are very hard to read in big chunks, as I've already noted. It's more a matter of scanning, trying to see how things fit together, if there are over-arching themes. I have a few thoughts here as well:Some of these sayings of Buddha are good sense, and we saw them in Confucius, and we see them in Proverbs. A wrongly-directed mind will do to you far worse than any enemy; a rightly-directed one will do you good.All the talk of “emptying” and forgetting the self is bleak to me. It's a completely different mindset from the Greek philosophy I've read until now. It's not Stoic; it's a kind of blankness, a rejection of self but not an embrace of anything else as far as I can tell. Reading...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.An interesting combination this week. Ted Gioia, the creator of my reading list, called it “Love and War,” but it felt like a lot more than that. And last week, I called it a hodgepodge, but I can admit I was wrong.Plato's Symposium is the third of Plato's works on this list. After wrestling with Ethics in particular last week, I was happy to get back to my friend. Symposium is written as a dialogue among friends, recalled by one who wasn't there, a little like the game of “Telephone” we'e all played. The friends' topic? Love, specifically eros. Given that this is upper-class Ancient Greece, there is a significant discussion of love between men; honestly romantic love between men and women is practically ignored. The reading plan only covered a few portion of Herodotus' Histories, Books 1 and 6-8. For full disclosure, I did NOT complete the reading but stopped with Book 7. In my edition of Histories the assigned books were more than 350 pages and I simply ran out of time. If I had done all the reading this week I would have been around 430 pages! Given that I “signed up” for about 250 pages per week, I had to stop. Confession time over.As always, I have so many, many thoughts about these works. For Symposium, I summarized each person's eulogy as a way to get my hands around the text. A few ideas:Obviously Love held an important place in the lives of Greeks. This entire dialogue is centered around it, but it doesn't look like love in many ways. I'm accustomed to thinking of love as wanting and being willing to work for the best of your beloved, and that being mutual. That desiring “for” someone else, rather than merely desiring them, was absent at least as far as I could see.There are a number of points made about Love as the dialogue progresses, and they definitely don't agree. As always, you're left to parse out the better and worse arguments. “You complete me” (yes, Jerry Maguire) makes an appearance! That attitude has been around a looooong time. Aristophanes tells a long and pretty funny tale about how human beings were at one time two-headed, eight-limbed creatures, but when Zeus got mad and split everyone in two. Now we go around looking for our other half.Does Love motivate us to honor? What kind of Love would do that? Or maybe Love is a moderating force? (I found that a weak argument.) Is its purpose beauty? Those are all offered as arguments, and all are rejected by Socrates. Socrates, via his mentor Diotima, argues that Love's purpose is procreation. As someone who has actually been pregnant several times, I found Socrates' discussion of pregnancy to be uncomfortable, to say the least. There is a ton of homoerotic talk, especially from Socrates and Alcibiades. It is just so strange to me that there is virtually no discussion of love between men and women, but tons between older and younger men. As usual, my bias shows, but it's who I am.On to Herodotus. He's been on my radar since I read History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer about a year and a half ago, and seeing him on the reading list was part of my motivation to jump in. He did not disappoint. The sections that I read were the origin stories of Croesus and Cyrus, and Persia, and then the beginning of the Persian War. I ended with the Battle of Thermopylae, which is an amazing story in its own right. A few takeaways:Every military leader should read this book. I may actually send it to my son who is in the Navy! There are examples of excellent leadership, and cranky...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.Ethics is the most challenging reading I've done, possibly ever. I'm not sure if it's because I am out of the habit of reading deeply, or my attention span rivals a gnat's, or if this text is actually that hard, but I pushed through. After reading about virtue, and habit, and endurance, and choosing pain because you know it will lead to the good thing, I was not about to stop.We talk a little about the importance of a good translation (more on that to come!) and take a deep dive into note-taking. This is a big project, and I wanted to be sure to retain the big ideas as I went along. I share the things I'm doing, what seems to be working and what I don't do.There is so much to this text. (Maybe that's another reason it was so intense?) In no particular order, just a few notes. There are three basic ways of life: pleasure, politics, and contemplation. Don't confuse pleasure with happiness, because they aren't the same. Contemplation is great—you might be happy—but there's no real action, and that is part of what virtue requires. So, political life, a life lived in relation to others, is the highest good.A virtue is typically the middle way between the vices of too much and too little. For example, courage is the middle way between recklessness and cowardice.Reciprocity is what holds a community together (there's the politics!), and economics is even based on the idea of reciprocity.Friendship. My goodness, I could have used these thoughts at 18, or 24, and can definitely use them now. There are three types of friendships: of utility, of pleasure, and complete. Complete is rare, and so you should attend to it. But it can end if the friends become markedly less equal in some way. Knowing that might help you inoculate against it.Aristotle breaks everything into taxonomies—I mean, the man was obsessed with categorizing everything. It's much more of an engineer's approach to life than Plato's with his ideas about Forms.Regarding Poetics, what amazing guidance about storytelling in tragedy or epic. I wonder if modern filmmakers ever have to read this.Metaphor is the master poet's tool.When I began this project I said I'd read introductions minimally and try to engage solely with the text as much as possible. I needed help with Aristotle, and I highly recommend Larry Arn's series from Hillsdale College.Music this week was Bach's Cello Concertos. Beautiful, lush, varied. I have a real love affair with the cello so this was a pleasure to listen to! You can listen here.This is a year-long challenge! Join me next week as we return for love with Plato and war with Herodotus.LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify -

Was passiert, wenn Literatur zum endlosen Unterhaltungsautomaten wird? Marie und Gregor analysieren, wie KI die Grenze zwischen aktivem Lesen und passivem Konsum verwischt, wenn wir mit Mephisto aus "Faust” Pizza essen oder durch Hogwarts streifen. Sie diskutieren, ob der literarische "unendliche Spaß" uns intellektuell verkümmern lässt oder ob wir mit KI eine neue, bewusstere Form des Lesens entwickeln können. Diese Folge wurde am 30. April 2025 auf der Leipziger Buchmesse aufgezeichnet. Über die Hosts: Gregor Schmalzried ist freier Tech-Journalist, Speaker und Berater, u.a. beim Bayerischen Rundfunk. Marie Kilg ist Chief AI Officer bei der Deutschen Welle. Zuvor war sie Produkt-Managerin bei Amazon Alexa. In dieser Folge: 0:00 Interaktive Literatur 12:30 Die perfekte Unterhaltung? 25:30 Wie wir uns gegen KI-Unterhaltung wappnen Links und Quellen: Podcast-Tipp "Eat.Read.Sleep” https://1.ard.de/eatreadsleep-cp Alternativer "Faust” von ChatGPT https://chatgpt.com/share/67e8f353-3ea4-800b-8ac9-3dd78ed7cde7 Ted Gioia über Sucht und Unterhaltung https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024 Faris Yakobs Medienpyramide https://faris.medium.com/you-are-what-you-eat-7881b962ed3b Fediverse und Mastodon https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/mastodon-tagesschau-102.html Redaktion und Mitarbeit: David Beck, Cristina Cletiu, Chris Eckardt, Fritz Espenlaub, Elisa Harlan, Franziska Hübl, Marie Kilg, Mark Kleber, Gudrun Riedl, Christian Schiffer, Gregor Schmalzried Kontakt: Wir freuen uns über Fragen und Kommentare an kipodcast@br.de. Unterstützt uns: Wenn euch dieser Podcast gefällt, freuen wir uns über eine Bewertung auf eurer liebsten Podcast-Plattform. Abonniert den KI-Podcast in der ARD Audiothek oder wo immer ihr eure Podcasts hört, um keine Episode zu verpassen. Und empfehlt uns gerne weiter!

I'm reading Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. We continue with the Odyssey this week. I'm joined this week by my son Jack Drury. Jack is pursuing a Masters in Classics at the University of Chicago, so we are on familiar ground for him here.I'm a beginner at reading the classics, but I've decided to just "crack the book" and get started. Here are a few of my key take-aways from this week:What will I take from this week? Let's see:A deeper understanding of Greek mythology. I have a copy of Bullfinch's Mythology on my bookshelf and will probably be dipping in and out of it soon. A better view of the ancient world, its customs and habits of life. I know it's fiction, but the way the poem describes the interactions between people of different classes, between men and women, and between city-states is eye-opening. I'm tempted to carry my modern worldview into these stories, and to find fault with various people. Instead, I really have to suspend my judgement to understand what is going on and how it compares to what I already know.A richer view of the Bible, believe it or not. I've read the Bible through about ten times (maybe more). Reading other ancient works ADDS to my understanding of the world the ancient Hebrews lived in. It's one thing to understand the Old Testament, but so much richer to understand how very different the Hebrews' struggles with God were compared to the Greeks' encounters with their array of gods and goddesses.Finally, my last take-away is one that deserves its own paragraph. I am angry, honestly, that every bit of this kind of literature was erased from my education. Who did that? Why? Who decided that Flowers for Algernon was worth my attention but Odysseus and Telemachus and Pallas Athena and Penelope weren't?Jack and I also have a long discussion about the heart of the Odyssey. What is it truly about? Is it a homecoming, or a story of exiles, or a model for suffering? How can we as 21st-century Americans relate to these ancient Greeks?This is a year-long challenge! Join me next week as we head to eastward and read Confucius.CONNECTTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

This week, we tried an experiment: a Substack live event! Matthew Gasda wrote a popular article about Romanticism, his contribution to an ongoing debate. Samuel Kimbriel had a few disagreements with Gasda's piece. In the spirit of Wisdom of Crowds, we hosted our first-ever live-streamed Substack debate.It went pretty well! We hope to host more. By popular demand, here is a video recording of that debate. Please continue the discussion in the comments below!— Santiago Ramos, executive editorRequired Reading:* Matthew Gasda, “A Few Doubts About Neo-Romanticism” (WoC).* CrowdSource: “Hopeful Romantics” (WoC).* Ted Gioia, “Notes Toward a New Romanticism” (The Honest Broker).* Ross Barkan, “The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms” (Guardian).Recommendations:Matthew Gasda: * Terence Malick, To the Wonder (YouTube).* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (Amazon). * Any biography of Goethe (Amazon). Samuel Kimbriel:* Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (Poets.org). * Novalis, Hymns to the Night (Amazon). Santiago Ramos:* Ludwig von Beethoven, Piano Concerto Number 4, Second Movement (YouTube). Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

It took a long time after I first read David Menconi's work to finally meet him, and longer still to sit with him for an extended conversation, but fortunately, the time has finally come. And if the saying “good things come to those who wait” applies here, if I was indeed waiting years for that Tuesday afternoon interview in late September 2024, then it is doubly appropriate now that our conversation sees the light of day in this podcast nearly another half a year afterwards. Decades after first reading his work, more than a year after first meeting him, and another stretch of months after interviewing him, now is the moment for all of this to come together. It all feels a bit fortuitous, a feeling which is echoed in our conversation, especially regarding the subject of David Menconi's latest book. David Menconi was a staff writer at the Raleigh News & Observer for 28 years, beginning in 1991, when the music scene in the region was exploding nationwide. He has also written for Rolling Stone, Billboard, Spin and New York Times. His latest book is titled Oh, Didn't They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music. David Menconi spoke with me at the IBMA conference in his adopted hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, in a conversation which touches on the remarkable story of Rounder Records, a music label whose story, as David put it, is the kismet story. A label formed by three idealistic folkies fresh out of college, it went on to champion the music of artists ranging from Alice Gerard to Alison Krauss, from the Blake Babies to Billy Strings, and from Ted Hawkins to Tony Rice. David talks about the Rounder Records story, the current state of the music industry, the challenges faced by writers and musicians alike, as well as the significant history of bluegrass music in the city of Raleigh and the state of North Carolina and more, including music excerpts from Rounder Records artists like Norman Blake and George Thorogood in this episode Southern Songs and Stories. David Menconi Songs heard in this episode:Tony Rice “Monroe's Hornpipe”, from The Bluegrass Album Band, Volume 6“Tango Cool“ by Ted Gioia & Mark Lewis, from Tango Cool, excerpt“Ginseng Sullivan” by Norman Blake, from Back Home In Sulphur Springs, excerpt“Move It On Over” by George Thorogood & the Destroyers, from Move It On Over, excerpt“Away From the Mire” by Billy Strings, from HomeThanks for being here! We hope you can help spread awareness of what we are doing. It is as easy as telling a friend and following this podcast on your platform of choice. You can find us on Apple here, Spotify here and YouTube here — hundreds more episodes await, filled with artists you may know by name, or musicians and bands that are ready to become your next favorites. This series is a part of the lineup of both public radio WNCW and Osiris Media, with all of the Osiris shows available here. You can also hear new episodes on Bluegrass Planet Radio here. Thanks to everyone at the International Bluegrass Music Association for helping to make this interview possible, and to Jaclyn Anthony for producing the radio adaptations of this series on WNCW, where we worked with Joshua Meng, who wrote and performed our theme songs. This is Southern Songs and Stories: the music of the South and the artists who make it. - Joe Kendrick

I'm reading Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. Week 2 starts with Greek Poetry, and then we start Homer and The Odyssey. What a great week!I'm a beginner at reading the classics, but I've decided to just "crack the book" and get started. Here are a few of my key take-aways from this week:The surviving Greek Lyrics are very male-dominated, full of war and fighting and politics, with not a lot of attention paid to nature or beauty, or even romance. That is, until you get to Sappho, a woman. Her verses are really beautiful. I can't help but wonder why. Is it just what survived? Or is that an accurate reflection of Greek society? I thought it was the second until I read Homer.The Odyssey is full of male and female characters, and they are both important to the story. So where the poetry was very male-centric (except for Sappho) Homer absolutely isn't. I mean, Penelope seems kind of weak, but Athena is absolutely crucial to the plot. I will have to think about this a lot more.Odysseus is a pain in the neck. While I love the story, I'm not a fan of the guy himself so far, at least by Book 10. For instance, when he gets ready to pass by the Sirens, he is told to lash himself to the mast of the ship IF he wants to hear the Siren Song. And that's what he chose to do! Why would he not just say, “Nope, I'll put beeswax in my ears like the rest of the crew and we will just sail on by.” It seems supremely arrogant.Telemachus, on the other hand, seems to me to possibly be the better hero. I'm looking forward to seeing him find his dad.I have a lot of other thoughts this week, especially about the Fagles translation I read.This is a year-long challenge! Join me next week to finish the Odyssey. We'll be joined by a fun guest!CONNECTTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

I'm reading Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. We start with Plato! The Last Days of Socrates and excerpts from The Republic. I'm a beginner at reading the classics, but I've decided to just "crack the book" and get started. Here are a few of my key take-aways from Plato:Human nature just doesn't change. Socrates talks about how to influence a crowd (by misrepresenting ideas), and he gives a pretty funny explanation of misanthropy that I didn't expect. (You hate people because you expect them to be perfect and they aren't. Grow up, get real, and understand that the vast majority are neither purely good or purely evil, but somewhere in the middle.)The distinction between an Idea (maybe think of it as a quality, like Beauty) and the thing that has the beauty (like a beautiful vase, for example) is important. The object can point to the Truth of the quality but never perfectly. It is critical to be very clear on what is the Idea and what is the object exemplifying that Idea. That sounds very obvious when I write it but in the real world it is easy to skip over.These books covered things I had heard of, like the Theory of Ideas, the Argument from Affinity, and the Theory of Recollection. I won't go into them here, but I have kept notes to trace them for myself. There was a surprising amount of reflection on the nature of the soul. Now, of course, I'm wondering exactly when did the Greeks divide man into body and soul, and what exactly did “soul” mean for them? I know they didn't necessarily think of it like I think of my soul as a Christian.Book I of The Republic is all about “doing right,” a phrase for a Greek word that is also translated “justice” but incorporates a much bigger and more moral sense than mere legal justice. There is a lot to think about for people who are considering leadership, especially political leadership. Finally, the Cave Allegory. I thought it was basically about not seeing things clearly, but learning to see them as they really are. In fact it is much, much more than that. In particular, Socrates talks about learning to see in the bright light, and then trying to come back to those inside the cave, trying to explain the truth. And there's a line that I'll misquote, but the point is, “Are you blind because you have always been in the dark, or are you blind because you were dazzled by brightness?” What a question.This is a year-long challenge! Join me next week for Greek Poetry and The Odyssey.CONNECTTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

Sostiene el musicólogo Ted Gioia que la historia de la música es una disputa sin fin entre quienes inventaron el ritmo de una partitura: nuestras extremidades.

Intro: Inexpensive tea and microplastics on cutting boards5:12: Complaining shrinks your brain9:40: Characteristics of depression and bad therapy, complaining is contagious.12:00: What was designed to help us, now makes things works. So much of it is backwards; the internet, technology, etc.19:00: Mel's Kitchen Cafe has nothing to gain from a publisher.23:51: Bypassing gatekeepers, going organic.27:07: Dude Perfect, platforming others.30:30: Being a good (judo) partner and working well with others.35:19: Instilling empathy in our kids for others.38:52: The teeter-totter example of feeling better about yourself and your sense of righteousness.44:45: Show Close Too Busy to Flush Telegram GroupSend us a PostcardCanavoxThe Milk Frother Currently Being Tested!Pique Tea - Referral Link (it's super-delicious and healthy)Ledger Hardware Wallet - Referral Link (store your crypto securely!)

Episode 233 On this week's edition of the YMC podcast, your hosts Jay Gilbert and Mike Etchart break down these important stories: "The Playlist Power Broker Who Makes Or Breaks New Artists" (The Wall Street Journal); "Is The Album Dead? Are We Facing A World Of Endless Singles & EP's?" (Soundmatters); "In The Music Business, 80 Is The New 20" (Ted Gioia). Plus an audio clip from a presentation by Darren Hemmings.   Subscribe to the newsletter! YourMorning.Coffee

Today the Pugs discuss a post by Ted Gioia on his Substack, The Honest Broker. The title of the post is, "The State of the Culture, 2024" Gioia is a well known music critic, and is actually the brother of Dana Gioia (the poet). Ted Gioia's Substack is nearing 200,000 subscribers--that's very impressive. In the post the Pug discuss he outlines the demise both of art and entertainment by two new forces unleashed by Silicon Valley. It isn't a pretty picture. The guys respond with suggested spiritual disciplines that can counter the developments Gioia describes. Tune in to see if you agree! Substack Article: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024?r=3mqy0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Support the Pugcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thetheologypugcast?fbclid=IwAR17UHhfzjphO52C_kkZfursA_C784t0ldFix0wyB4fd-YOJpmOQ3dyqGf8 Catch our new documentary ‘A Pugcast Pilgrimage: Lewis, Oxford, and Our Postmodern Age’ on Canon+: https://canonplus.com/tabs/discover/videos/34865?fbclid=IwY2xjawF-J-9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHXqj6CIhUs6mTwkMc-AHhKiP1E4dPAtOm60rgu69RZ2LfhqYLJg2JHx4uQ_aem_LV-nOWc1vnhV6scW9cGZpA The Theology Pugcast is a ministry of Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville Alabama. To view more media from TRC, visit their website: https://trinityreformedkirk.com/media-podcasts

Today the Pugs discuss a post by Ted Gioia on his Substack, The Honest Broker. The title of the post is, "The State of the Culture, 2024" Gioia is a well known music critic, and is actually the brother of Dana Gioia (the poet). Ted Gioia's Substack is nearing 200,000 subscribers--that's very impressive. In the post the Pug discuss he outlines the demise both of art and entertainment by two new forces unleashed by Silicon Valley. It isn't a pretty picture. The guys respond with suggested spiritual disciplines that can counter the developments Gioia describes. Tune in to see if you agree! Substack Article: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024?r=3mqy0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Support the Pugcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thetheologypugcast?fbclid=IwAR17UHhfzjphO52C_kkZfursA_C784t0ldFix0wyB4fd-YOJpmOQ3dyqGf8 Catch our new documentary ‘A Pugcast Pilgrimage: Lewis, Oxford, and Our Postmodern Age' on Canon+: https://canonplus.com/tabs/discover/videos/34865?fbclid=IwY2xjawF-J-9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHXqj6CIhUs6mTwkMc-AHhKiP1E4dPAtOm60rgu69RZ2LfhqYLJg2JHx4uQ_aem_LV-nOWc1vnhV6scW9cGZpA The Theology Pugcast is a ministry of Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville Alabama. To view more media from TRC, visit their website: https://trinityreformedkirk.com/media-podcasts

Today the Pugs discuss a post by Ted Gioia on his Substack, The Honest Broker. The title of the post is, "The State of the Culture, 2024" Gioia is a well known music critic, and is actually the brother of Dana Gioia (the poet). Ted Gioia's Substack is nearing 200,000 subscribers--that's very impressive. In the post the Pug discuss he outlines the demise both of art and entertainment by two new forces unleashed by Silicon Valley. It isn't a pretty picture. The guys respond with suggested spiritual disciplines that can counter the developments Gioia describes. Tune in to see if you agree! Substack Article: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024?r=3mqy0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Support the Pugcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thetheologypugcast?fbclid=IwAR17UHhfzjphO52C_kkZfursA_C784t0ldFix0wyB4fd-YOJpmOQ3dyqGf8 Catch our new documentary ‘A Pugcast Pilgrimage: Lewis, Oxford, and Our Postmodern Age’ on Canon+: https://canonplus.com/tabs/discover/videos/34865?fbclid=IwY2xjawF-J-9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHXqj6CIhUs6mTwkMc-AHhKiP1E4dPAtOm60rgu69RZ2LfhqYLJg2JHx4uQ_aem_LV-nOWc1vnhV6scW9cGZpA The Theology Pugcast is a ministry of Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville Alabama. To view more media from TRC, visit their website: https://trinityreformedkirk.com/media-podcasts

OpenAI Is A Bad Business Are We Now Living in a Parasite Culture? Taylor Lorenz, Chronicler of Digital Culture, Will Start Own Newsletter Twitter's value in freefall: Fidelity cuts estimate by whopping 79% Masnick: Gavin Newsom Vetoes Terrible AI Bill 1047, But Brace For Something Worse Google showcases bizarre double-sided Japanese keyboard, which it won't sell — the keyboard uses a Möbius strip as its foundation Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Emily Dreibelbis Guest: Ed Zitron Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: e-e.com/twit bitwarden.com/twit

An update on what's next now that Season Six is complete, along with some book and music recommendations!BOOK RECOMMENDATIONSThe History of Jazz by Ted Gioia, 3rd edition - 1997, revised 2021Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning by Gary Marcus, 2012MUSIC RECOMMENDATION LINKSSteve Pardo - DOS - (also in Video Game form on Steam)Completions - I Needed HelpRuth Moody - WandererThe Onesies - The Onesies Dig With the Wrong FootSheena Ringo - HiizurutokoroAdi Oasis - Lotus GlowSt. Vincent - All Born ScreamingLaura Marling - Short Movie (Director's Cut)----LINKS-----SUPPORT STRONG SONGS!Paypal | Patreon.com/StrongsongsMERCH STOREstore.strongsongspodcast.comSOCIAL MEDIAIG: @Kirk_Hamilton | Threads: @Kirk_HamiltonNEWSLETTERnewsletter.kirkhamilton.comJOIN THE DISCORDhttps://discord.gg/GCvKqAM8SmSTRONG SONGS PLAYLISTSSpotify | Apple Music | YouTube MusicSHOW ARTTom Deja, Bossman Graphics--------------------JULY 2024 WHOLE-NOTE PATRONSRobyn MetcalfeBrian TempletCesarBob TuckerCorpus FriskyBen BarronCatherine WarnerDamon WhiteKaya WoodallJay SwartzMiriam JoyRushDaniel Hannon-BarryChristopher MillerJamie WhiteChristopher McConnellDavid MascettiJoe LaskaKen HirshMelanie AndrichJenness GardnerPaul DelaneyDave SharpeSami SamhuriJeremy DawsonAccessViolationAndre BremerDave FloreyJULY 2024 HALF-NOTE PATRONSAshleyThe Seattle Trans And Nonbinary Choral EnsembleKevin MarceloMatt CSamantha CoatesJamesMark NadasdiJeffDan CutterJoseph RomeroOl ParkerJohn BerryDanielle KrizMichael YorkClint McElroyMordok's Vape PenInmar GivoniMichael SingerMerv AdrianJoe GalloLauren KnottsDave KolasHenry MindlinMonica St. AngeloStephen WolkwitzSuzanneRand LeShayMaxeric spMatthew JonesThomasAnthony MentzJames McMurryEthan LaserBrian John PeterChris RemoMatt SchoenthalAaron WilsonDent EarlCarlos LernerMisty HaisfieldAbraham BenrubiChris KotarbaCallum WebbLynda MacNeilDick MorganBen SteinSusan GreenGrettir AsmundarsonSean MurphyAlan BroughRandal VegterGo Birds!Robert Granatdave malloyNick GallowayHeather Jjohn halpinPeter HardingDavidJohn BaumanMartín SalíasStu BakerSteve MartinoDr Arthur A GrayCarolinaGary PierceMatt BaxterLuigi BocciaE Margaret WartonCharles McGeeCatherine ClauseEthan BaumanKenIsWearingAHatJordan BlockAaron WadeJeff UlmDavid FutterJamieDeebsPortland Eye CareRichard SneddonCliff WhitlockJanice BerryDoreen CarlsonDavid McDarbyWendy GilchristElliot RosenLisa TurnerPaul WayperMiles FormanBruno GaetaKenneth JungAdam StofskyZak RemerRishi SahayJeffrey BeanJason ReitmanAilie FraserRob TsukNATALIE MISTILISJosh SingerAmy Lynn ThornsenAdam WKelli BrockingtonVictoria Yumino caposselaSteve PaquinDavid JoskeBernard KhooRobert HeuerDavid NoahGeraldine ButlerMadeleine MaderJason PrattAbbie BergDoug BelewDermot CrowleyAchint SrivastavaRyan RairighMichael BermanLinda DuffyBonnie PrinsenLiz SegerEoin de BurcaKevin PotterM Shane BordersDallas HockleyJason GerryNell MorseNathan GouwensLauren ReayEric PrestemonCookies250Damian BradyAngela LivingstoneDiane HughesMichael CasnerLowell MeyerStephen TsoneffJoshua HillGeoff GoldenPascal RuegerRandy SouzaClare HolbertonDiane TurnerTom ColemanDhu WikMelmaniacEric HelmJonathan DanielsMichael FlahertyCaro Fieldmichael bochnerNaomi WatsonDavid CushmanAlexanderChris KGavin DoigSam FennTanner MortonAJ SchusterJennifer BushDavid StroudBrad CallahanAmanda FurlottiAndrew BakerAndrew FairL.B. MorseBill ThorntonBrian AmoebasBrett DouvilleJeffrey OlsonMatt BetzelNate from KalamazooMelanie StiversRichard TollerAlexander PolsonEarl LozadaJustin McElroyArjun SharmaJames JohnsonKevin MorrellColin Hodo