Reviews and News:
How the Stoics dealt with anger: “People get angry for all sorts of reasons, from the trivial ones (someone cut me off on the highway) to the really serious ones (people keep dying in Syria and nobody is doing anything about it). But, mostly, anger arises for trivial reasons. That’s why the American Psychological Association has a section of its website devoted to anger management. Interestingly, it reads very much like one of the oldest treatises on the subject, On Anger, written by the Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca back in the first century CE.”
Weinstein Books closed by Hachette: “Books that are currently under contract will be published by the company’s Hachette Books imprint, and people working at Weinstein Books will join the Hachette imprint, according to Michael Pietsch, the chief executive of Hachette Book Group.”
Michael Dirda reviews a biography of the Renaissance’s biggest gossip, Giorgio Vasari: “As Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney remind us in The Collector of Lives, scholars still turn to Vasari as a primary source, albeit with caution: He is hardly what one would call impartial or disinterested. Vasari badmouths his enemies (such as Cellini), while his novella-length account of Michelangelo approaches hagiography. Moreover, rather than verify his facts, he tends to ‘print the legend.’ Did the young Giotto really draw a perfect O when asked to supply an example of his work? Did Piero di Cosimo really live almost entirely on hard-boiled eggs? Maybe, maybe not. Some stories are too good to check.
Martin Scorsese thinks the film-rating site Rotten Tomatoes is terrible for films and filmmakers. Josephine Livingstone disagrees.
In Case You Missed It:
In The New Criterion, Gary Saul Morson revisits Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s two great literary works—the Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel.
The life and work of John William Corrington: “He was a poet, a neglected novelist for whom one might hope for a revival, a journalist, a lawyer, a respected college professor at Loyola University, and interestingly the author of five screenplays, including The Omega Man and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Add to that a philosopher in cowboy boots.”
The science behind Mona Lisa’s smile.
In The Irish Times, David Gluckman explains how he invented Baileys in 1973.
Interview: Sam Leith talks with Simon Heffer about the Age of Decadence.
Classic Essay: Jacques Barzun on “Byron and the Byronic”: “Byron’s thoughts, works, and character as a whole cannot be adequately summed up in the figure of a headlong lover in an open collar, whose fits of melancholy are a pose.”
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