Culture Watch

The author of Carthage Must Be Destroyed takes a close look at our preconceived notions of Carthage and Carthaginians, colored as they are by the accounts of Greek and Roman writers who had a vested interest in presenting Carthaginians as cruel and duplicitous. The City of God is as rich in lofty thinking, baroque writing, sympathetic characters, vivid settings, and suspense as anything you are likely to see more than once or twice in a lifetime. Take your time, but read it. more »

What it means to think. Is it just to manipulate Ideas or to create them? And how does this relate to the value of the computer? "We need good old-fashioned literacy; not just computer literacy ... what data matters and what data does not matter." more »

Kahlo's affair in New York City with her friend, the Hungarian-born photographer Nickolas Muray which ended in 1939, and her divorce from the Diego Rivera, left her heartbroken and lonely, but she produced some of her most powerful and compelling paintings and self-portraits during this time more »

Joan Cannon wrote: Empathy isn’t born into everyone, but it should be possible to be trained into those who don’t possess it to begin with. Most people are uncomfortable in the presence of what they see as authority. That’s the way most patients see their doctors. A physician who can be useful to her will know she has sustained an emotional injury before she tells him what it is. Then that doctor will have a real sense of how that must feel, not a merely intellectual knowledge of facts of average months’ duration of acute grief. more »