For centuries, all sorts of people—generals and politicians, athletes and coaches, writers and leade
Is there anything sadder than a person whose work is their life? They neglect their family, they put
There’s a moment that almost everyone remembers from their childhood. They have just received someth
George Ball, the diplomat and advisor to President Kennedy (one of who David Halberstam would call ‘
1981 was a tough year for tennis great Billie Jean King. That year, she sat down to write her memoir
Death and dying are the worst parts of life, right? After all, they do end the whole thing. So while
We put a lot of thought into making distinctions about what’s urgent and what’s not. We put a lot of
In Game of Thrones, the people of the Iron Islands believe they have been entitled by God to steal a
It’s interesting, if you think about Greek and Roman mythology, that the Gods were so active and bus
The anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun and the song it inspired, One by Metallica, tell the story of
One of the best passages in all of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is the opener to Book V. In it, Mar
In Walter Isaacson’s wonderful new biography of Leonardo Da Vinci, he spends a lot of time dissectin
Why are good people attracted to serving bad people or bad causes? Aristotle taught Alexander the Gr
It’s easy to stir up resentment, harder to create common ground. It’s easy to point out what’s wrong
All of us have day jobs. Even professional philosophers are still professors or authors, which means
Confucius was once asked for advice by a student, and in replying essentially urged him to wait and
It was on this day in the year 86 AD, that Antoninus Pius, the man who would become best known as th
It’s famously said that you should learn from the mistakes of others because you can’t live long eno
In Aaron Thier’s novel The World Is A Narrow Bridge (the title is a proverb we have written about be
The line from Confucius was that “Virtue is never solitary; it always has neighbors.” What he meant
The New York Times Obituary section this past weekend featured a somberly diverse list of losses: Wi
