Literature
The novel as a way of thinking about love, freedom, society, and the self.
The Stranger — A companion to Camus’s novel of the absurd, on alienation, honesty, and the indifferent universe.
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Quartet — A companion to Jean Rhys’s novel of dependency and displacement in bohemian Paris, on vulnerability, power, and the outsider’s eye.
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Anna Karenina — A companion to Tolstoy’s great novel of love, jealousy, and society, with a who’s-who of the principal characters.
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Film
Cinema read the way one reads literature — for the ethical situation at its core.
Billy Wilder: Deception and Its Costs — A companion to eight Wilder films, read for the theme of deception and its moral price.
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Luchino Visconti: End of an Era — A companion to five late Visconti films on the decline of the aristocratic world.
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Martin Ritt: Hollywood Against the Current — A companion to six Ritt films on conscience, the blacklist, and dignity under pressure.
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Philosophy
Ideas as tools for living — read closely, argued with, put to use.
The Ages of Life (Schopenhauer) — A companion to Schopenhauer’s reflections on youth, age, happiness, and the shape of a life.
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The Nature of the Emotions (Spinoza) — A companion to Spinoza’s analysis of the passions, on freedom, understanding, and the examined life.
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On Duties (Cicero) — A companion to Cicero’s De Officiis, on the honorable, the expedient, and what we owe one another.
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Themes
A single idea, condition, form, or question read across several thinkers at once.
Solitude: Four Ways of Being Alone — Montaigne, Camus, Weil, and Pessoa, from the fortified self to the dissolved self.
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Exile: Four Lives Driven Out — Zweig, Freud, Mann, and Arendt, from exile as loss to exile as insight.
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The Letter as a Window: Four Correspondences — Nietzsche and Salomé, Vita and Virginia, Kafka, and Van Gogh and Theo, from the letter as intimacy to the letter as evasion.
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Can a Machine Think? Four Answers — Turing, Wiener, Dreyfus, and Weizenbaum, from intelligence as mechanism to intelligence as irreducibly human.
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Characters: The Art of Reading Human Nature — Theophrastus, La Bruyère, Montaigne, George Eliot, and Canetti — the character sketch traced across 2,300 years.
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