Beth Blum News Today

Billionaires and the power of manifestation.

Elif Batuman ’99 Talks ‘The Idiot’ and Writing Process at Humanities Event | News | The Harvard Crimson

Fiction about immigrants tends toward melancholy and tragedy. Dimitri Nasrallah’s new novel delivers something different

Harvard students, scholars find everyday rewards on the other side of Joyce’s century-old epic.

Cartoon by Erik Bergstrom Still, as Beth Blum has pointed out in “The Self-Help Compulsion” (2020), reading books for life advice is an ancient practice. Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” can be read as a guide to virtuous living. (Like many of McHugh’s writers, Aristotle was only summing up the characteristics of people generally counted as virtuous in his time and place—that is, the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century B.C. You want to be thought virtu...