1,393 words

Translations: French, Spanish

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (discussed here and here), Connectors — people with friends and acquaintances in many different social worlds — are crucial in making information go viral. But where do they get their information?

(more…)

Benjamin West, The Bard, 1778

2,309 words

In retrospect, Aryans appear to have harbored a naïve faith in the natural relationship between reputation, fame, and merit. True, our conceptions served us well enough in our own world. But that was prior to the Age of Defamation. Now we see that fame, reputation, and moral worth can be completely unrelated. It is child’s play for dominant, cunning, and unscrupulous elites to destroy reputations, fabricate evidence and opinions, and reverse the judgments of history—and have their constructs stick, and be universally accepted.

(more…)

903 words

English version here

Para os antigos, Homero era “o começo, o meio e o fim.” Uma visão do mundo e até mesmo uma filosofiaestão implicitamente contidas em seus poemas. Heráclito resumiu seu alicerce cósmico com uma frase bem colocada:  (more…)

Rembrandt, “Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer,” 1653

930 words

Translated by Greg Johnson, German translation here

For the Ancients, Homer was “the beginning, the middle, and the end.” A vision of the world and even a philosophy are implicitly contained in his poems. Heraclitus summarized his cosmic foundation with a well-turned phrase: “The universe, the same for all beings, was not created by any god or by any man; but it always was, is, and will be eternally living fire . . .” (more…)