BONUS: Clock’s Ticking—You Listening?

Seneca tells the story of the philosopher Crates, who was walking in Athens when he saw a young man talking to no one around. “What are you doing?” Crates asked. “I am talking to myself,” the man repl...

19 Maalis 20192min

Epictetus was born a slave. Quite literally, his name means, in Greek, acquired. Ultimately, he came to be the property of a man named Epaphroditus, who kept Epictetus chained up long enough that he b...

18 Maalis 20193min

Let’s take a second to meditate on this observation from John Cage, the experimental musician and student of Zen philosophy:“That one sees that the human race is one person (all of its members parts o...

15 Maalis 20193min

The way to make all your problems, even the really vexing and painful ones, seem less severe? It comes from Seneca. All you have to do, he says, is:“Draw further back and laugh.”When you zoom out far ...

14 Maalis 20192min

“I don’t have time to read a book that long,” you might say when someone recommends one of those epic volumes from the Ron Chernows and Robert Caros and Stacy Schiffs of the world. And Alban Butler’s ...

13 Maalis 20192min

Last year, the writer Chuck Palahniuk received the kind of news that all of us dread. Someone he trusted—the book agent who had represented him for years—had been slowly but steadily robbing him blind...

12 Maalis 20193min

In his wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, the Pulitzer Prize winning scholar Stephen Greenblatt spends a lot of time analyzing a pivotal moment early in the life of Saint Augustine, wh...

11 Maalis 20193min

One of Seneca’s most powerful strategies comes from his time as a Senator. Speaking again of a thought from Epicurus, with which he only partly agrees, Seneca explains that he is so readily able to dr...

8 Maalis 20194min