Oct 30, 2024
We are truly on the home stretch now--folding up the frame story around Odysseus' adventures, we can see there are three women that walk beside him on his way back to Ithaca. Each of them, in her own way, must love him without holding on to him, as he goes through the painful process of recovering who he is after all...
Oct 25, 2024
We're so back, folks--it's Words, Words, Words, our series on translation! Election or no, we stay translating Homer. This time I've taken one of the passages from our Odyssey walkthrough--the summoning of the dead in Book 11--and compared versions from the 1700s to today. What sorts of compromises do translators have...
Oct 22, 2024
We're nearing the last leg of Odysseus' journey, and he's really caught between a rock and a hard place. Between the devil and the deep blue sea. Between...well, between Scylla and Charybdis. After a dramatic turning point among the dead, Odysseus is now faced with what he says is the saddest and most pitiable horror he...
Oct 21, 2024
It's been just under a week since my new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World was released. In that time, I've been privileged to have a whole array of wonderful conversations about the book and its themes. One of the most stimulating, wide-ranging, and enjoyable of those was with the UCSD physicist Brian...
Oct 18, 2024
I was startled when I walked into my living room today to find Andrew Klavan (no relation) sitting in my chair! But while he's in town I thought we might as well talk about his new book, A Woman Underground, the latest in the Cameron Winter series. It's a detective story that's at once gripping and...