Peter Murmann

What makes it so difficult to interpret how people in former times have thought about the human condition is that words change their meanings over time, sometimes morphing into the exact opposite of what they originally meant. As I just learned by reading in ‘The Economist’ a review of “Happiness: A History, ” the word [Read More]

Adam Kirsch in his Dec 5, 2005, review in the New Yorker of Juliet Barker’s new biography Wordsworth: A Life writes that Woodsworth believed that the soul, uncontaminated by wealth and unperverted by extreme poverty, is essentially good; more, that it is part of a universal frame of goodndess, which can also also be glimpseed [Read More]

DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN explains in the WSJ review of “The Power of Movies” what happens when we are at the movies. Seduced, disturbed, beguiled—something strange and compelling happens when we watch a movie: When my daughter was four years old, we took her to see “The Wizard of Oz.” She emerged from the darkness transformed: [Read More]

Dad’s Coming 1873.  See the Online Catalog of the Exhibit.

Audio Tour of Right & Left

Surprisingly, the article on Lincoln’s state of mind in this month’s Atlantic Monthly turned out to be very interesting. Making valid inferences after the fact about what propelled a person to act in a particular way is difficult, to put it mildly. With hindsight everyone has perfect vision. Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Great Depression does [Read More]