Zuzana Ruzickova fell in love with piano and harpsichord early – and then the Nazis took her family to Terezin (Theresienstadt). “She insists music helped her survive. She remembers writing down a small section of Bach’s English Suite No 5 in E minor on a scrap of paper when she left Terezin in a cattle truck bound for Auschwitz.”
How To Be A Stoic (A Real One) And Stop Making Yourself Crazy
“Reading Epictetus, I realized that most of the pain in my life came not from any actual privations or insults but, rather, from the shame of thinking that they could have been avoided.” Elif Batuman writes about how the teachings of a first-century ex-slave kept her sane.
What Is Time? Perhaps It’s No More Than Our Own Experience Of It
“For more than two thousand years, the world’s great minds have argued about the essence of time. Is it finite or infinite? Does it flow like a river or is it granular, proceeding in small bits, like sand trickling through an hourglass? And what is the present? Is now an indivisible instant, a line of vapor between the past and the future? Or is it an instant that can be measured – and, if so, how long is it? And what lies between the instants?” Adam Burdick argues that the first thinker we know of who got it right was St. Augustine.
Formidable! Guess Which Will Soon Be The Most-Spoken Language On The Planet?
“While the top languages in the world today are Mandarin, English, Spanish, and Arabic, Natixis has produced figures that show French will be number one in 35 years time.”