Finals!  Every year I forget how crazy they are.  A lot of stuff all at once.  Anyway; if any of you out there have some free time, here are some thought-provoking things to read:

Interesting story about George Eliot's 150-year old translation of Spinoza's Ethics which will be published, really for the first time widely in English, this coming February.  

Why NATO matters--beyond, as the old joke went, "to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down."   And while we're at it, here's a discussion of US troop deployments around the world, today and over the past half-century and more.  

Amazing photos of ships up to twenty-five hundred years old, still resting on the bottom of the (anoxic) Black Sea.

The importance of being grateful; in the piece, a Benedictine is quoted as saying, "it's not happiness that makes you grateful; it's gratitude that makes you happy."  

Good exposition of John Maynard Keynes as author of 1919's The Economic Consequences of the Peace.   

A good piece that argues that the "figure in the carpet" of all of Martin Scorcese's films (not movies) is his study of how we seek God.

Enjoy.  It's cold and rainy here tonight, but the temperature is supposed to drop and it may snow overnight.  I hope you are warm and dry, wherever you are.