Morning returns. My mind, as always, tumbles at wake of day, waves touching every shore.
Whales fill my thoughts, those biblical, wondrous leviathans of the deep, the creatures Job extols as exempla of divine majesty beyond infinity’s reach.
I think of Rachel Carson, guardian of the deep, her The Sea Around Us, prescient in its admonition, eloquent in its utterance, observing in 1951 alteration of climate: “… the frigid top of the world is very clearly warming up” and “the surface waters of the North Atlantic {are} showing rising temperatures.”
Childhood memories of Newburyport sea-captain mansions lining High Street, their terraced porches, vistas toward the ocean. MobyDick. Coastal Maine. Nantucket’s cobbled lanes. Whalers and harpoons.
We hunted them to near extinction. Right whales, only a scarce few.
Thoughts of Gerard Manley Hopkins and “Binsey Poplars”:
“O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew…”
Sea mining has begun.
There are no boundaries.
As sea lover Philip Hoare writes, stirred by a whale sighting off my beloved Cape Cod, “I watch as the whale plays in the surf the way a dog runs around a field. There are less than three hundred and forty of their kind left, set against the teeming multitude of the whole human race. Too few whales now to fill this great ocean, or animate it enough to save themselves. Too few to fertilise it, with their living excretions or their dead bodies. Too few females to continue the line” (William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love).
We don’t hunt Right whales anymore, but human activity menaces still—fishing-net entanglements, vessel collisions, plastic pollution. Navy underwater sonar shakes the ocean deep.
Most ominously, only about 70 breeding females remain.
A world without whales? Like dinosaurs, the stuff of children’s storybooks and museum displays? It’s a world I’m glad to leave.
Poet Robinson Jeffers echoes my thought in his “End of the World”:
“When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War, We used to take it for known that the human race Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all His racial past. But now I don’t think so. They’ll die faceless in flocks, And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.”
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. —Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”
The NYT this evening is reporting the death of Kentucky sage Wendell Berry at his home in Henry County. Earlier this year, I focused on reading his major essay collections and two of his novels.
Berry stridently opposed agribusiness, advocating for family farmers and the sustaining of local communities. He refrained from using farm machinery and chemical fertilizers. Horses and mules, they did the plowing.
Berry had his stubborn ways, nearly Amish in his habits. He wrote his many books in pencil on a yellow legal pad, his wife Tanya typing them up for publishers. He never owned a computer or even a television. His clock was set by sunrise and sunset. In simplicity, he found a happiness that possessions could not give.
He had much to teach us about a way of life that yielded contentment through resourcefulness and the social intimacy of small-town America—a way of life lamentably vanishing in the throes of urbanization, the decline of the family farm, the corporate erosion of local industries, and the flight of young people to the cities.
I remember the America he loved: the small town with its eccentric characters; schoolmates, many from family farms; baseball on the town common; a trip to the big city a major happening; the doctor, with his little black bag, coming to the house; a trip to the barber, a conversation. Families seemed stationary, one generation succeeding another. Faces changed. The surnames remained. This is the America Wendell wrote about.
When hard times came, as inevitably they do, we were there for each other, binding up the wounds. We knew our heroes, and we gladly paid them tribute.
I miss that America. And I will miss Wendell.
He tried to teach us, but we didn’t listen. A voice is silenced, but his wisdom hovers.
Rest peacefully, Wendell, in the dark Kentucky soil you so loved.
Keep your brain young. It’s never too late. There’s a world out there waiting for you, gorgeous in its buffet.
You’ve heard of neuroplasticity—that the brain can rewire itself? Yes, it’s true: everything you think, everything you do, triggers new neuroconnections, along with revamping older ones. The more you focus on something new, the more your brain gets good at making it easier for you to comprehend and make part of your daily routine.
I learned Spanish in my 80s. I read a book each week, new gleanings with every read, new brain wrinkles, the kind you want.
Your brain likes exercise, just like Fido.
Free online courses opened up whole worlds I’d never touched—from the ecosystems of the Amazon to feminist poetry, and even a Yale module on oncology.
New conversations. New friends. Widened empathy, walking in another’s shoes.
Forrest Gump tells us, “Life is like a box of cħocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” That’s true, but part of the excitement is getting to choose.
For me, life is like doing a jigsaw puzzle, putting the pieces in place. Isn’t that a lot of what life’s about?
Growing older doesn’t have to mean the doldrums. A rocking chair, endless TV, nostalgia about the past.
Grandma Moses took up painting seriously at 77. You know the story.
Frank McCourt of Angela’s Ashes fame, was 66 when he wrote it, winning a Pulitzer.
I can give you tons more examples.
Forming new habits can be challenging. For me, I’ve found it takes six weeks to lock-in a new habit, consistency a key. Apart from illness, I never miss a Spanish read or showing up week after week, quietly writing nearly 700 essays.
Venturing new things, replacing bad habits, mindlessly practiced with better ones, isn’t easy.
Think of it this way: There’s a fatty substance in the brain known as myelin that wraps itself around your neural connectors, augmenting faster signaling, or what we might call automatic response pathways.
Everything you do repeatedly digs the pathway deeper, which is why bad habits are sometimes hard to break. Your brain fights you at first. It likes to automate behavior and conserve energy. It’s simply doing what evolution designed it to do.
You are what you think and do. Your brain, in turn, creates cravings accordingly. You like munching on Ruffles? The brain makes that easy.
Ridding yourself of bad habits doesn’t come down to will power. It’s in the doing, starting simply, sometimes like children in their first stumbling steps, but with repeated tries, succeeding.
The brain gets the message. You’ve built a new highway. Like Route 66, the old highway no longer gets traffic.
Believe me, I’ve done what I’ve counseled. That it works I know from its results.
Each day, I wake to my chosen pathway. The joy of the psalmist comes to mind: “The lines are fallen upon me in pleasant places” (Ps.16:6 KJV).
I may be ripe in years, but I am the happiest I’ve ever been.
Slender and youthful at 37, with chest-length hair and a gentle, affable demeanor, Dr. Jason Arday was widely popular among students and colleagues when he was appointed Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge in March 2023.
His hire made history. The child of Ghanaian immigrants, he was the youngest Black professor in the university’s centuries-old record, holding a prestigious seat alongside a Professorial Fellowship at Jesus College.
Yet, just three years later, Arday abruptly resigned.
Days after stepping down, on August 14, 2026, police found him dead at his Battersea, London residence under non-suspicious circumstances, a tragic end to a meteoric rise brought down by an escalating controversy over his academic credentials and personal backstory.
THE SHELVED INVESTIGATION The unraveling began long before it reached the public. In September 2025, Jack Grove, a senior reporter for Times Higher Education, alerted by Arday’s extraordinary athletic claims, sent Arday three direct emails requesting a response to alleged instances of plagiarism in his doctoral thesis and journal publications.
Rather than addressing the queries, Arday hired the law firm Carter-Ruck, known for aggressive media litigation, and reported Grove to the Metropolitan Police for criminal harassment.
The Met spent four months investigating the journalist. In February 2026, an officer called Grove, ordering him to cease contacting Arday because the inquiries were impacting Arday’s mental health. Facing legal threats and police intervention, Times Higher Education shelved Grove’s draft article.
THE WHISTLEBLOWER AND THE BLOG POST The story broke wide open through a different channel. In June 2026, an unnamed Cambridge faculty member, frustrated by what they alleged was an internal administrative cover-up to avoid a public scandal, approached Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge philosophy researcher.
Cofnas subsequently ran Arday’s 2015 doctoral dissertation through plagiarism-detection software and, in July 2026, published his findings on Substack, alleging extensive verbatim text duplication.
Cofnas was already a lightning rod for controversy. In February 2024, he had published an essay claiming that Black people possess lower average cognitive ability due to genetic differences, asserting that in a meritocracy the proportion of Black professors at elite institutions like Harvard “would approach zero percent.”
While a Cambridge University investigation concluded that Cofnas’s essay fell within lawful free speech under UK law, Emmanuel College severed ties with him in July 2024, citing the hostile environment created by his public statements.
Cofnas challenged his dismissal in court, but in March 2026, a tribunal ruled that while his philosophical beliefs qualified for legal protection, Emmanuel College acted lawfully in terminating his affiliation due to the disruptive impact and tone of his writings.
Despite Cofnas’s controversial background, his technical analysis of Arday’s text duplication was undeniable. On July 24, 2026, The Times published an explosive front-page exposé documenting passages in Arday’s dissertation that were identical or near-identical to previously published scholarship without attribution. Media scrutiny quickly spread to his published journal papers and his autobiography, which claimed he had remained non-verbal until age 11, illiterate until 18, and had run 30 marathons in 35 days.
RESIGNATION AND AFTERMATH On August 5, 2026, Arday resigned his Cambridge professorship. In an open letter addressed to colleagues and the public, he maintained his innocence while pointing to the unbearable personal strain:
When I accepted the extraordinary honour of becoming Professor of Sociology at Cambridge, it was, without question, the greatest professional privilege of my life… Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack… The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love… This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me.”
Following his death nine days later, his family expressed shock, stating that Arday was a “gentle man” who had been “subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse… by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him.”
AN ACADEMIC EVALUATION Who bears responsibility for this tragic aftermath? In academia, the appropriation of another scholar’s work is an unpardonable offense. In my view as a former academic, the evidence of Arday’s unacknowledged text duplication and hyperbolic biographical claims is beyond doubt. Multiple passages in his writing trace directly back to uncredited source material, while his personal timeline, progressing from total illiteracy at age 18 to a doctoral dissertation in his twenties without an established paper trail of remedial education, defies statistical reality.
The root of this tragedy lies in an elite university rushing headlong to project progressive credentials. Cambridge was under immense pressure to diversify. According to reporting by The New York Times (August 15, 2026), internal hiring documents reveal that the selection panel bypassed candidates with far stronger scholarly records, brushing aside early warnings regarding Arday’s work as “vile efforts” to discredit a rising Black scholar. In doing so, the university abandoned its primary duty: to act as an impartial arbiter of intellectual truth.
While it is imperative that we confront racism wherever it rears its head, when institutions substitute top-down equity of outcome for equality of opportunity based on individual merit, they do not defeat prejudice: on the contrary, they merely replace rigorous judgment with performance art.
By waiving standard vetting out of ideological panic or political ideology, Cambridge did not elevate Jason Arday; instead, it exposed him, elevating a vulnerable man to a height built on sand, leaving him defenseless when the tide of inevitable scrutiny came in.
This tragedy serves as stark warning for modern higher education. When universities lower the bar to purchase moral virtue on the cheap, the consequences are ubiquitous: real scholarship is devalued, public trust in academia is shattered, and the genuine, unassailable achievements of minority scholars are quietly cast under a shadow of institutional doubt.
Everyone gets a prize—until the bill comes due. Cambridge got its headline, the ideologues got their symbol, and Jason Arday paid with his life.
It’s a funny thing how I sometimes reach back into my childhood for memories that yield comfort in older years, simple truths endowed with a wisdom that sustains.
I loved Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories, smartly drawn from her keen observation of England’s rural landscape, reinforcing my deep affection for my fellow creatures. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter have been my buddies all the days of my life.
Along with them came the wild, staccato rhythms of Dr. Seuss and every volume of the Doctor Dolittle series.
Maybe I’m just waxing sentimental—I’ve always been a deeply feeling person—but in surfacing these forgotten memories, I feel reborn.
Here are several gems I indulged in just this morning, each granting its own quiet contentment. First, the anonymous lines of the children’s poem traditionally titled “The Polite Rabbit”:
I met a grey rabbit, at the top of the hill. We both stopped to look, and stood very still. But I didn’t scare him, and he didn’t scare me, Because I was polite, and so was he.
Christina Rossetti captured a similar quiet kinship in “The Caterpillar,” tracking its transformation from humble crawler to exquisite butterfly, a reminder of how what seems simple can, given allowance, mature into unexpected beauty:
Brown and furry Caterpillar in a hurry, Take your walk To the shady leaf, or stalk, Or what not, Which may be the chosen spot. No toad spy you, Hovering bird of prey pass by you; Spin and die, To live again a butterfly.
The capstone for me since my youth has always been William Wordsworth’s celebratory poem of nature’s beauty, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”—that supreme exemplar of poetry rendered in simple language, of “emotion recollected in tranquility”:
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
I have since read every one of his several hundred poems—some better than others, but always granting solace.
Fortunately, great verse is still being written to guide our children and grandchildren on their life journeys. Take, for example, this marvelous stanza by Jeanne Willis, from her illustrated picture book, WildChild (2012):
They caught all the wild children, and put them in zoos, They made them do sums and wear sensible shoes. They put them to bed at the wrong time of day, And made them sit still when they wanted to play. They scrubbed them with soap and they made them eat peas. They made them behave and say pardon and please. They took all their wisdom and wildness away. That’s why there are none in the forests today.
Talk about rearing conformist children, alienated from nature, taught never to draw outside the lines, never to rebel and find their true selves—wow!
Call it nostalgia if you like, but William Wordsworth got it right when he wrote in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” that “The Child is father of the Man.”
By that, he meant that childhood’s gift of innocence and wonder amid nature’s plentiful grace helps define the adults we ultimately become.
I believe, like Wordsworth, that the child lingers within us. Recovering that child within, its capacity for wonder, to notice a rabbit on a hill, a caterpillar on a leaf, a field of daffodils dancing in the wind—these are not childish things to be outgrown.
Many years ago, I took a graduate seminar on John Milton centered on ParadiseLost (1667), one of the crowning achievements of the English Renaissance. But it was another work—Areopagitica (1644), his impassioned defense of freedom of speech—that has resonated with me ever since.
Written in opposition to Parliament’s Licensing Order, Milton argued that truth is strengthened, not endangered, by being tested against error, a bold stance in an age when dissent could invite imprisonment or execution.
Milton’s intellectual hero was Galileo. In Paradise Lost, he evokes the great astronomer when describing Satan’s massive shield:
“…the moon, whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views…”
The “Tuscan artist” is Galileo, whose telescope transformed humanity’s understanding of the heavens.
In Areopagitica, Milton recalls visiting Galileo at his villa in Arcetri, where the aging scientist lived under house arrest after being condemned by the Roman Inquisition for advocating the Copernican model of the solar system.
Forced under threat of torture to recant what he knew to be true, Galileo spent his final years blind and confined. I like to imagine that Milton’s visit offered some measure of consolation to a man whose only offense had been to follow the evidence where it led.
Today, speaking one’s conscience seldom risks imprisonment in liberal democracies, but it can still carry severe consequences: reputational ruin, professional ostracism, organized harassment, and targeted campaigns intended to silence rather than engage.
Public discourse, accelerated by social media, spreads these consequences with astonishing speed, rewarding denunciation far more readily than disagreement.
Our universities bear part of this responsibility. Among the intellectual influences that have shaped portions of academic life is Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, mentor of the New Left. In his 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse proposed a striking inversion of classical free expression:
“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”
He made the practical implications explicit, advocating for the “withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture.”
In Marcuse’s view, there are issues where “certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.”
Whether one agrees with Marcuse or not, his framework represents a profound departure from Milton’s conviction that truth emerges through open contest rather than enforced orthodoxy.
I have no dog in today’s culture wars. Censorship has become an equal-opportunity temptation for both the Left and the Right. Battles over gender, sexuality, race, religion, history, and politics have produced book bans, withdrawn publications, disinvited speakers, removed art, renamed institutions, and ousted educators. The particulars vary; the impulse to silence does not.
Milton himself understood the cost of dissent. Like Galileo, he eventually lost his sight. Following his death in 1674, he was denied burial in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner due to his support for the Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War. Buried instead at St. Giles Cripplegate, his grave was desecrated more than a century later by souvenir hunters who carried away portions of his bones as grisly relics.
Some may dismiss Milton’s model as anachronistic, but I remain convinced that falsehood is exposed by argument, not by prohibition. The remedy for bad ideas remains better ideas, fearlessly expressed.
History offers sobering reminders of what happens when enforced orthodoxy replaces open debate. Authoritarian regimes throughout history have always understood that controlling speech is the prerequisite to controlling thought.
America has never perfectly reconciled its ideals with its practice, which is precisely why freedom of speech remains indispensable.
We improve our republic not by silencing one another, but by arguing honestly, listening seriously, and trusting that truth has nothing to fear from debate.
As Milton wrote in Areopagitica nearly four centuries ago:
“And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
When Christopher Nolan decided to film TheOdyssey, he had no shortage of distinguished English translations from which to choose. From among them, he chose Emily Wilson’s, remarkable for its freshness, clarity, and contemporary English while remaining faithful to Homer’s poetry.
Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated TheIliad. Unlike some modern “translators,” whose work consists largely of revising earlier English versions, Wilson translates directly from the ancient Greek text. She is equally at home in Latin, a reminder of the extraordinary linguistic preparation classical scholarship once demanded.
That accomplishment is no small feat. Were Homeric Greek taught as a modern foreign language, its highly inflected grammar would make it among the most demanding languages to master, up there with Chinese, Arabic, and Russian.
Wilson also reads classical Greek fluently, the evolved language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Aristotle with its unique vocabulary and grammar.
My own acquaintance with the classical languages began in high school, where I studied Latin for two years. The curriculum offered four years, but I opted instead for French and German. Today, my old high school no longer teaches those languages, having replaced them with Spanish.
A few years later, I enrolled in an intensive eight-week Harvard summer course in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Empire and language of the New Testament. Easier than Homeric or classical Greek, it nevertheless presents formidable challenges.
Our Australian instructor insisted that we learn Greek actively rather than merely decipher it. Instead of translating Greek into English, we were expected to orally translate English into Greek. With only ten students in the room, we couldn’t evade being called upon repeatedly to think, speak, and stumble in the language in real-time. That meant knowing where the accents fell for each word, often very arbitrary, unlike Spanish and Italian.
It was a demanding approach, but by the end of the course I could work through New Testament passages with little more than the aid of a dictionary. Most of that Greek has long since vanished, although I can still read the alphabet, which proved unexpectedly useful years later when I studied Russian, whose Cyrillic alphabet derives in part from Greek.
Impressed with my teacher, I asked him how long he had studied the classical languages. His answer has remained with me ever since: “Thirteen years of Latin; eleven years of Greek.” I was in good hands.
I’ve often regretted not keeping up with Greek, a language renowned for precision in contrast to English, whose richness often lies in words layered with multiple shades of meaning, wonderful for poetry, but often less exact. Reading Greek reveals layers of irony, structural symmetry, and philosophical nuance that disappear in translation.
Growing up in Massachusetts, one could spend a Saturday “junking” through secondhand bookstores and antique shops, coming away with Latin and Greek grammars for a dime apiece, evidence of the former preeminence of classical languages in the curriculum of schools such as Boston Latin School.
Long before my own time, that same New England landscape was shaped by minds saturated in the classics. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Plato in the original Greek, finding in those ancient dialogues the architecture for his own transcendental philosophy. His friend Henry David Thoreau famously carried his Greek text of TheIliad with him to Walden Pond, writing in Walden that true literature must be read in the language in which it was written—the ancient letters “carved out of the breath of life itself.”
Much of that world has faded. Outside a handful of elite institutions like Deerfield Academy, Groton, Phillips Exeter, or in schools like England’s Eton, the sustained study of Latin and Greek has become increasingly rare. Wilson herself began studying both languages at Oxford High School, an independent all-girls school in Oxford before reading Classics (“Greats”) at Balliol College, Oxford, and earning her doctorate at Yale.
I sometimes imagine what it would have been like had I continued with Greek throughout my life: to read Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Homer in their own words, perhapsallowing my synapses to mount a quiet resistance to incipient forgetfulness.
I think, too, of modern writers like J.K. Rowling and Toni Morrison, whose formal classical training echoes structurally throughout their work. And yet, the figure who haunts me most is one who had to build her own door to the ancient world: Virginia Woolf.
Denied the university education her brothers received, simply because she was a woman, she taught herself Greek and continued reading it throughout her life. For Woolf, Greek was not an academic ornament, but a living intellectual companion shaping her prose, her essays, and her understanding of literature.
Each year I return to her magnificent essay, “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925), invariably lingering on her summarizing sentence:
“It is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, the confusion, the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”
I haven’t been to a movie theater in five years. With inflation, it’s become an extravagance, unnecessary when you can simply wait a few months and rent the film for home viewing.
Having said that, and still believing it, I fully intend to break the habit for Christopher Nolan’s TheOdyssey, opening in theaters July 17.
Perhaps I’ve fallen prey to the hype, but I have an almost irresistible urge to see this one on the big screen. I taught Homer’s epic for thirty years, and every time I returned to it I discovered something I had somehow missed before.
If pressed, I would call TheOdyssey the greatest saga ever told. Born of an oral tradition nearly three thousand years ago, it remains astonishingly contemporary, its influence reaching through Western literature: Virgil’s TheAeneid, James Joyce’s Ulysses, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, and countless other works that consciously echo Homer’s enduring voyage.
Joyce called it the most universal of stories, and I think he was right.
Within its pages are some of literature’s most enduring archetypes, recalling Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth: the hero’s journey of separation, ordeal, and return; the enchantress and the temptress; the faithful spouse; judgment, homecoming, and restoration.
Then there are the symbols: the sea, the descent into the underworld, Penelope’s shroud, the bow that proves identity, the purifying fire.
Three great themes, however, lend the poem its lasting power.
First, assertion versus passivity. Thoroughly existential long before existentialism, The Odyssey insists that we become ourselves through engagement rather than retreat, through action rather than surrender. The Lotus-Eaters, Calypso, and the luxurious ease of Phaeacia all tempt Odysseus to abandon his purpose.
Second, boundaries. Again and again Homer reminds us that there are limits human beings ignore at their peril: reverence for the sacred, loyalty to family, fidelity to one’s companions, respect for hospitality. Even Scylla and Charybdis embody the necessity of steering between destructive extremes.
Finally, there is cosmic evil. Whether arising from nature’s indifference or human cruelty, evil is real, unmoved by moral persuasion, and must be recognized before it can be confronted. Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops remains one of literature’s unforgettable dramatizations of that truth.
Some critics have faulted Nolan’s film for historical inaccuracy. Matt Damon, they say, doesn’t look Greek. The armor is not archaeologically faithful. Telemachus reportedly calls his father “Daddy.” Most controversially, Nolan casts the Oscar-winning Lupita Nyong’o in a double role as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra.
None of those objections strikes me as especially important.
Few moviegoers will care whether the armor is perfectly Mycenaean. As for the contemporary dialogue, Nolan appears to have drawn heavily from Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation, whose accessible modern English has introduced Homer to an entirely new generation of readers.
That seems to me a virtue, and not a flaw. The Odyssey deserves as wide an audience as possible, especially among younger readers, upon whom its future ultimately depends.
As for Nyong’o’s casting, Elon Musk condemns it as “groveling” to “woke” expectations. The resultant backlash, unfortunately evident in some 600,000 dislikes of YouTube’s final trailer, says far more about our present moment than it does about Homer.
I find Nyong’o a magnetic presence, and admire Nolan’s willingness to ignore predictable objections. We inhabit a global culture now. Homer belongs to all of us.
Advance sales suggest that plenty of people agree. The film’s 70mm IMAX screenings have been selling out months in advance.
My wife and I already know where we’ll be. In our seats. And with buttered popcorn, too.
Today is renowned ethicist Peter Singer’s birthday, and I wish him everything well, both now and in the future. No one has shaped my values more than Peter, consistently monitoring the ethical dilemmas of contemporary life with courage, sensitivity, candor, and clarity—attributes resplendent in the intellectual brilliance of some fifty books treating animal suffering, poverty, mortality, the environment, affluence, and the plight of developing nations.
As a dedicated environmentalist, I wouldn’t be a vegetarian were it not for Singer: “We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet—for the sake of hamburgers” (Animal Liberation).
Across the years, I’ve made transparent my profound admiration for utilitarian John Stuart Mill, whose OnLiberty is a must-read. In Singer, we have his worthy successor, reinvigorating the intrinsic value of philosophy rooted in the factual and empirical, while putting to the test the prejudicial assumptions that deter our collective happiness.
In a time of ubiquitous existential despair, he reminds us that humans possess a latent altruism that can respond and make for a better world; one more equitable, lived with empathy and tolerance.
And Singer walks the talk. Upon graduating university, he began donating 10% of his income to charity. Today, that’s mushroomed to an astonishing 33% of his income, directed entirely to high-impact charities. On winning the coveted Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture in 2021, he gave its $1 million award entirely to charity.
Singer has restored philosophy as an axiom of the purposeful life, writing that “philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”
The happiest of birthdays to you, Peter, and many more!
I didn’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday yesterday. How could I, with Trump still at the helm of a listing ship? Our country is so deeply fractured that I lack confidence our ship of state can ever be restored to an even keel again.
While the mid-terms loom, a new, more radical faction seems to be taking hold, offering simple remedies, under the aegis of expanded government, to complex problems that may well prove incendiary to America’s best interests.
History is being distorted—accompanied by the rise of a heated rhetoric, the past filtered through a modern lens, as if we can sanitize our heritage by consigning to oblivion our flawed heroes who nonetheless made America possible.
To contend, as some now do, that the Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery is a profound untruth. In 1776, Great Britain had no intention of dismantling the institution. While Royal Governor Lord Dunmore famously offered freedom to slaves who fled rebel masters to fight for the Crown, his proclamation was a cynical tactic of war, not a moral crusade; Dunmore himself owned a hundred slaves whom he exempted from his proclamation, and Britain did not outlaw slavery in its empire until 1833. The colonists revolted over representation and imperial overreach, not a defense of bondage.
Far from protecting slavery, the radical ideals unleashed by the Revolution ignited the Western world’s very first widespread abolitionist movement, a moral arc that would ultimately culminate in a bloody Civil War and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
History taught from the periphery, filtered through rigid ideology or simplified into monolithic narratives, is intrinsically dangerous. It rests on a priori assumptions and is too often promulgated with dogmatism. True understanding requires nuance, humility, and courage.
Intolerance and intimidation increasingly menace our daily life. It’s a different America from the one I grew up with—dynamic, prosperous, a nation deserving of its patriotism.
And why not?
At the end of WWII, a victorious America was the sole nuclear power. It possessed an army of 14 million, an air force of 50,000 planes, and the largest naval force in history with nearly 7,000 ships, including 99 aircraft carriers.
Yet, alone among the global empires of history, America walked away from total dominion and chose peace over subjugation.
This is the America I remember and want back again.
Brimmings: up from the well 