Newsletter: October 2022

Maybe true freedom lies not in being free from all obstacles but in imposing the right obstacles—that is, the ones that channel you in the direction you want or need to go.

Newsletter: September 2022

If I was to teach in a prison, I asked myself, what’s a topic on which I stand to learn as much from my students as they stand to learn from me? The answer announced itself at once: freedom.

Newsletter: August 2022

Better to drop your grand ambitions and just take things as they come, says Zhuangzi. Don’t fuss so much over life and life won’t stir up a fuss for you.

Newsletter: July 2022

So what is a country? I’ve put this question to students. What would be required, I ask, for us to establish the classroom as an independent state?

Newsletter: June 2022

Which stories we tell, and how we tell them, goes a long way toward articulating who we are and how we understand ourselves.

Newsletter: May 2022

Sages and mystics of many stripes have claimed that the secret to life lies in hidden in some unexpected place. An equation from probability theory devised by an eighteenth-century statistician is certainly not the least unusual.

Newsletter: April 2022

The Indian dramatist crafts distinctive emotional effects that allow the audience to savour those emotions; those emotional flavours, or rasas, culminate in a savouring of tranquility; and savouring tranquility offers a foretaste of the spiritual liberation that is our ultimate goal. Not at all bad for a night out at the theatre.

Newsletter: March 2022

If you want to be a better person, the subject you should study is mathematics.

Newsletter: February 2022

We live in an era that’s impatient and grasping, says Heidegger. Our technological prowess is only the most outward evidence of this more general way of being in the world.

Newsletter: January 2022

It’s as if Plato were proposing a wholesale ban on Hollywood, Netflix, the publishing industry, and pop music—and that’s just for starters.