Humanity can’t go anywhere without dragging along an endless parade of cacophony. The sounds of the city; cars honking, engines racing, shouts, screams, sirens, music blaring, voices on the radio booming, accidents, helicopters, cackling, gunshots, commercials, sports broadcasts, sobbing—all of humankind relentlessly announcing itself in the grand parade. The countryside is better off, but is […]

Our classics and great traditions are a corpse that we resurrect every time we engage with them. If neglected, they remain a corpse—rotten, dead, forgotten—to our eternal detriment. The collected wisdom of the ages, disposed with like so much refuse. When engaged with properly, they are made new and live once more to illuminate the […]

Life is terrifying in its brevity. The sheer vastness of the world — the fact that there is just so much to take in and make sense of and then find something to dedicate your life to — is overwhelming. And what you choose better be the right thing. There isn’t really a whole lot of […]

Knowing the history of infectious disease epidemics and pandemics like plague, smallpox, cholera, etc. is important when it comes to understanding whatever new disease comes our way. In this video, I discuss how the plague thwarted Justinian’s efforts to make the Mediterranean a Roman lake again in the middle of the sixth century.