Peter Starr on Wisdom and Culture
Continue reading “The Wisdom of Fun Home in the Age of AI”If wisdom requires that we not take ourselves too seriously “as the center of everything,” then it is appropriate to ask whether the absence of self-mockery in both the generative AI essays and our work as literary critics does not mean that they, and we, fall short of wisdom as Bechdel sees it.
Photo: Medium
Continue reading “A More Novelistic Approach”We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.
Chinua Achebe, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”
Continue reading “Empathy and Irony”But then along comes “Behold the Dreamers,” a debut novel by a young woman from Cameroon that illuminates the immigrant experience in America with the tenderhearted wisdom so lacking in our political discourse.
Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Continue reading “Empathy and Cultural Dislocation”When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to the position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy.
Barack Obama, in Conversation with Marilynne Robinson
Continue reading “A.Ham in the Age of Trump”Hamilton continues to resonate because it speaks, consistently and profoundly, to a deep hunger for wisdom in American society today.
Continue reading “Giving Up on Paranoia”Wisdom is a perfect antidote to the paranoid style of American political culture today.
Portions of this post first appeared in Inside Higher Ed and are reprinted here with permission
Continue reading “Why Wisdom? Why Now?”“I am wiser than he is to this small extent that I do not think that I know what I do not know.”
Socrates, in Plato, The Apology of Socrates