What’s shakin’, Corelings? Can you believe that we are wrapping up our second month of summer break? We hope you are absolutelypining for your friends at the Core Curriculum. (We know we’re pining for you guys 😢)
- New York Times‘ op-ed contributor Bruce Headlam covers Bryan Doerries’ project Theater of War, a series of staged readings of passages from Sophocles war plays, including Ajax, accompanied by discussion among US veterans about their experiences.
- Shirley Graetz’s Gilgamesh and the Enchanted Garden is a Hebrew-language chapter book for young readers. Based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, it makes use of the author’s studies of cuneiform.
The cover of “Gilgamesh,” illustrated by Uriel Zohar.
- Hay-on-Wye, pilgrimage destination of book-lovers everywhere, presents the annual Hay Festival, where talks on Colm Toibin’s reworking of Aeschylus’s Oresteia and medieval manuscript illustration as well as interviews with authors abound.
- Machiavelli did nothing wrong. So argues author Erica Benner in her recently published book Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World, hoping to wade through legend and counterlegend to get to the facts about the Renaissance writer.
- What would Rousseau think about Donald Trump? Not good things, according to David Lay Williams for the Washington Post. He hopes to set things straight in his article, arguing against fellow WaPo columnist Michael Gerson, who mentioned that “Trumps politics borrows unconsciously from the 18th century Genevan philosopher” and that Trump “reflects the general will of the electorate.” Instead, Williams claims, Rousseau believed that the people were not always correct, as is written in the “Social Contract”:
The general will is always right, but the judgment which guides it is not always enlightened. It has to be to made to see objects as they are, sometimes as they ought to appear to it, to show it the good road it is looking for and to protect it from the seduction of particular wills. (source)
That’ll do it! See you next week, scholars!
