It's Monday so here are some links to start your day off right.

Nice long interview with playwright Will Arbery, author of “Heroes of the Fourth Turning”.

This is a good piece on the NYT Haiti story brouhaha of last month.

China’s attention to Western classics, especially Greek and Latin, get some attention in this piece—it’s very interesting, in fact. Would that we had anything approaching an awareness of the tremendous history of Chinese thought over the past, say, 2500 or so years.

Well this is sobering.  But I do think that Smil, the thinker interviewed here, no matter how cranky he comes across as, has a basic point right: apocalypticism and denialism are both false choices, we need to work hard at solving the problem before us, and we need sober help in doing that.

Ooh a new book of Kafka’s drawings is out!  Looks good…

This is a really interesting review of a book that seems to be trying to continue an older mode of scholarship without very much recognition that most other scholars think this older mode of scholarship has been quite significantly superseded, even rendered obsolete, by newer approaches. This reviewer agrees with that judgment, but nonetheless sees something to value in this project. Reading the review gave me a lot to think about about the shape and direction of scholarship in general, not just in this case.

Good small piece on Stuart Hall, giving a bit of background on him and a fair amount of foreground on him as divided between multiple places, and so rethinking his own identity as “positionality.”  Normally I hate that kind of verbiage, but in this case it kind of makes sense in a way no other word would. Also, in general, read Adam Tooze’s "Chartbook."

An interesting idea: alongside happiness and meaningfulness, another dimension of a rich and flourishing life is the psychologically rich life, comprised of many experiences, diverse and interesting. Worth considering.

May you have a psychologically rich day!  But also a calm one.