Daily Stoic

11 Final Takeaways From The Odyssey

Senica 2,000 years ago in one of his letters is lamenting just people totally missing the point of the Odyssey. And I think it's fascinating to think that 2,000 years ago, people were having these debates about where was Troy, where were the different islands, did it actually happen or not? Just like today, we're like, is Homer really one person? Was he blind or not?

Fresh Air

Best Of: ‘Odyssey’ translator Emily Wilson / Actor Jon Bernthal

I think if we have a quest narrative, whether it's in a poem, a novel, or a movie, we need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation. He needs to want something. So the fact that these desires seem to be stripped from Odysseus, he doesn't seem to want food, doesn't seem to want sex. What does he want?

EconTalk

Dwayne Betts on the Iliad

It's a conversation about reading as communion--and how a 2,800-year-old story became, unexpectedly, a way of connecting to each other.

EconTalk

Dwayne Betts on the Iliad

What happens when a poet who survived prison sits down with the world's oldest war story--and reads it in three sleepless, wandering days?

EconTalk

EconTalk Book Club on the Iliad (with Ido Hevroni)

Ego, pride, wrath, fear, gods, superheroes, mortals, and lots of killing. Welcome to Homer's Iliad, which reads at times like a script for a Tarantino film or the latest installment of the Avengers franchise.

Book of the Day

Laverne Cox on her childhood, 'Walden' and her new memoir 'Transcendent'

When I um read Walden when I was a freshman in high school, I was just sort of like transcendentalism. This is like this is what I want wanted to do my whole life. I wanted to transcend how people see me because I was assigned male at birth and because I'm black and poor in the South. I want to transcend this body. I want to transcend like time and space. And I finally had a word um for what I longed to do and what I felt like I was here to do.

Fresh Air

Have we been reading Toni Morrison all wrong?

Morrison is one of the incredible thinkers and theorists of racism as a pathology. And when she describes what it is to be racist, she's very insistent that this is a problem of the racist. This isn't actually a problem of the black person.

Conversations with Tyler

Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English

great literature is where ideas "walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world" in a way no other discipline can match