Social Psychologist Erich Fromm Diagnoses Why People Wear a Mask of Happiness in Modern Society (1977)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nCzsqKrkhE Modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine. —Erich Fromm There are more think pieces published every day than any one person can read about our current moment of social disintegration. But we seem to have lost touch with the insights of social psychology, a field that dominated popular intellectual discourse in the post-war 20t...
Tags: Psychology, Google, College, Current Affairs, Philosophy, Un, Albert Camus, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Erich Fromm, Camus, Durham NC Follow, Maria Popova, Jacobin, Fromm, Frankfurt School

20 Lessons from the 20th Century About How to Defend Democracy from Authoritarianism: A Timely List from Yale Historian Timothy Snyder

Image by Rob Kall, via Flickr Commons Timothy Snyder, Housum Professor of History at Yale University, is one of the foremost scholars in the U.S. and Europe on the rise and fall of totalitarianism during the 1930s and 40s. Among his long list of appointments and publications, he has won multiple awards for his recent international bestsellers Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin and last year’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. That book in part makes the argument that...
Tags: Google, Facebook, Europe, Putin, College, Russia, America, Ukraine, History, Power, George Orwell, Yale, The Guardian, Hitler, Albert Camus, Peter Pomerantsev

The UN’s World Happiness Report Ranks “Socialist Friendly” Countries like Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland & Switzerland as Among the Happiest in the World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3vsGlAvr04 One of the most pernicious, “dangerous, anti-human and soul-crushing” myths in the business world, writes Liz Ryan at Forbes, is the “idiotic nostrum” that has also crept into government and charitable work: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The received wisdom is sometimes phrased more cynically as “if you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen,” or more positively as “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” But “the importan...
Tags: Google, Politics, College, Economics, Current Affairs, Switzerland, Un, Albert Camus, Bhutan, Forbes, Buddhist, Bill Maher, Facebook Twitter, Ryan, Josh Jones, Durham NC Follow

The UN’s World Happiness Report Ranks “Socialist Friendly” Countries like Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland & Sweden as Among the Happiest in the World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3vsGlAvr04 One of the most pernicious, “dangerous, anti-human and soul-crushing” myths in the business world, writes Liz Ryan at Forbes, is the “idiotic nostrum” that has also crept into government and charitable work: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The received wisdom is sometimes phrased more cynically as “if you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen,” or more positively as “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” But “the importan...
Tags: Google, Politics, Sweden, College, Economics, Current Affairs, Un, Albert Camus, Bhutan, Forbes, Buddhist, Bill Maher, Facebook Twitter, Ryan, Josh Jones, Durham NC Follow

Simone de Beauvoir's 'remarkable' letters to Violette Leduc sold at auction

Sotheby’s, which sold the 297 letters, says they reveal ‘a complex and ambiguous relationship where unrequited passion and mistrust mingle’Almost 300 letters, mostly unpublished, from the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir to the French novelist Violette Leduc, including The Second Sex author’s rejection of her friend’s romantic advances, have sold for €56,700 (£51,500).Sent between 1945 to a month before Leduc’s death in 1972, the 297 letters reveal the intense friendship between t...
Tags: Europe, Books, France, Culture, Albert Camus, Sotheby, Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, LeDuc, Violette Leduc, Beauvoir, Manuscripts and letters

"I think the riskiest kind of novel is the one that tries to rescue us from mundane existence—by taking a closer look at mundane existence."

"If the tone falls flat, than the action is simply a series of discrete encounters, recreated on the page. In the best of these novels—from the work of Haruki Murakami to Albert Camus—the writer finds a tiny gap between the simple nature of things, and how they appear to us." From "In Praise of Sayaka Murata/John Freeman on a Young Japanese Writer We Should All Be Reading."  That review — in Literary Hub — was written 3 years ago, when the current Murata book was "Convenience Store Woman," wh...
Tags: Writing, Law, Haruki Murakami, Albert Camus, Sayaka Murata, Murata, Ann Althouse, Sayaka Murata John Freeman, Factory Anyone

Thinking About Indie Bookstores

One bookstore near the High Line in New York: “The last day we were open, I asked customers where they were from. Turned out that they were all British flying back home. The last sale was to an Englishman, who bought Albert Camus’ The Plague. We wished each other luck.” – The New York Times
Tags: Art, New York, Words, Albert Camus, 11.13.20

Five famous doctors in literature

Doctors have appeared in fiction throughout history. From Dr Faustus, written in the sixteenth century, to more recent film adaptations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the familiarity of these characters will be profitably read and watched by both experienced and future doctors who want to reflect on the human condition often so ably described by the established men and women of letters. Here, I have selected five famous doctors in literature who each exemplify a step in the progres...
Tags: Books, UK, Featured, Wales, France, Literature, Gustave Flaubert, Albert Camus, Henry James, Health & Medicine, General Medical Council, Emma, Cronin, Midlands, Lydgate, National Health Service NHS

An Animated Introduction to Albert Camus’ Existentialism, a Philosophy Making a Comeback in Our Dysfunctional Times

When next you meet an existentialist, ask him what kind of existentialist s/he is. There are at least as many varieties of existentialism as there have been high-profile thinkers propounding it. Several major strains ran through postwar France alone, most famously those championed by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus — who explicitly rejected existentialism, in part due to a philosophical split with Sartre, but who nevertheless gets categorized among the existentiali...
Tags: Google, Facebook, College, France, Germany, Philosophy, Algeria, Albert Camus, Quentin Blake, Seoul, TED Talks, Alain De Botton, Facebook Twitter, Sartre, Jean Paul Sartre, Boston Review

Invincible... Albert Camus

  Thank you for the many messages on my blog, email, and FB. I appreciate your opinions, your encouraging me to do what I feel and yet understanding my stance without having to spell it out. I am thinking and rethinking about the possibility of keeping my blog politically free, yet encouraging myself to listen without judgment, to understand the "why" in our differences. That is what I want to have a conversation about is the why are we so different in our opinions.                         [...
Tags: Travel, Albert Camus, French la Vie

Invincible... Albert Camus

  Thank you for the many messages on my blog, email, and FB. I appreciate your opinions, your encouraging me to do what I feel and yet understanding my stance without having to spell it out. I am thinking and rethinking about the possibility of keeping my blog politically free, yet encouraging myself to listen without judgment, to understand the "why" in our differences. That is what I want to have a conversation about is the why are we so different in our opinions.                       [Au...
Tags: Travel, Albert Camus, French la Vie

How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free

They were an odd pair. Albert Camus was French Algerian, a pied-noir born into poverty who effortlessly charmed with his Bogart-esque features. Jean-Paul Sartre, from the upper reaches of French society, was never mistaken for a handsome man. They met in Paris during the Occupation and grew closer after the Second World War. In those days, when the lights of the city were slowly turning back on, Camus was Sartre's closest friend. 'How we loved you then,' Sartre later wrote.They were gleaming ico...
Tags: Europe, Politics, Personality, Budapest, Hungary, Paris, Innovation, Literature, Philosophy, Ussr, Morality, Albert Camus, Le Monde, Self, Soviet Union, Charles de Gaulle

How Two Teenage Dutch Sisters Ended Up Joining the Resistance and Assassinating Nazis During World War II

Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940 and quickly overpowered the country’s small forces. Nazis arrested and deported Jews, created forced labor, strictly rationed food, and banned all non-Nazi organizations. “Almost every Dutch person was affected by the consequences of the occupation,” the Verzets Resistance Museum writes. “The choices and dilemmas facing the population became more far reaching.” Often those choices were stark: Collaborate and live? Or resist and willingly put onesel...
Tags: Google, Europe, College, Germany, Nazis, History, Netherlands, Albert Camus, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Freddie, Haarlem, Rossen, Durham NC Follow, Hannie, Truus

What did Hannah Arendt really mean by the banality of evil?

Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi's Final Solution.Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was 'neither perverted nor sadistic', but 'terrif...
Tags: Politics, Crime, Nazis, Israel, Evil, Jerusalem, Innovation, Philosophy, Violence, Nazi, Morality, Albert Camus, Jekyll, Hyde, Plato, Wolfe

‘D.A.R.Y.L.’ Sequel TV Series Starring Tony Hale in the Works For Some Inexplicable Reason

Remember D.A.R.Y.L.? I sure don’t, but it was a movie from 1985 about a young boy who was secretly a robot. And now, for reasons that are far beyond my understanding, there’s a TV series sequel in the works. It’s one of several titles in development over at TNT and TBS, and Tony Hale is set to star as the robot boy, who is now all grown-up…and obsolete. In 1985, the world met D.A.R.Y.L., a robot who looked just like a real boy (his name stands for Data-Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform). I g...
Tags: Television, Movies, Connecticut, Rob, Tbs, TNT, Albert Camus, Sony Pictures Television, Paramount, Tony Hale, Sarah Marshall, Film to TV, Hilary Winston, Philip Noyce, Nick Stoller, Stoller Global Solutions

How grit in the face of hopelessness brings out the best of the medical profession

The only drawback to reading The Plague by Albert Camus for the first time while experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic is that I will never get the experience of reading it from a less personal perspective. As the plague in the novel begins to unfold slowly through rat deaths and lockdowns, I recognized my own incredulity […] Find jobs at Careers by KevinMD.com. Search thousands of physician, PA, NP, and CRNA jobs now. Learn more.
Tags: Health, Education, Infectious Disease, Albert Camus, PA NP, CRNA, COVID-19 Coronavirus

"Some listeners will buy whatever he narrates, which might help explain why a collection of Albert Camus essays from the mid-20th century suddenly..."

"... found itself on the audiobook best-seller list last year. When the publisher Recorded Books needed someone to narrate all five volumes of Robert Alter’s new, acclaimed translation of the Hebrew Bible, Ballerini was chosen to read it.... After years spent giving voice to novelists ranging from Dean Koontz to Ha Jin, Ballerini was now also the voice of God.... At 50, Edoardo Ballerini enjoys a particular kind of stardom.... Reading and recording for hours was harder than he expected. Sound bo...
Tags: Amazon, Audiobooks, Law, Bible, James Earl Jones, Albert Camus, Ballerini, Dean Koontz, Ann Althouse, Robert Alter, Recorded Books, Edoardo Ballerini, Ha Jin Ballerini, Knausgaard Whitman Machiavelli

How Agatha Christie, Frederick Douglass and Albert Camus are getting us through this

What are we reading right now to make it through? Short answer: everything. CNN Opinion asked readers to share what they're reading during the pandemic; Jane Greenway Carr explores the eclectic responses and how what we're reading serves as a lifeline during the Covid-19 crisis.
Tags: Cnn, Albert Camus, Jane Greenway Carr, Agatha Christie Frederick Douglass

Opinion: How Agatha Christie, Frederick Douglass and Albert Camus are getting us through this

In his 1948 novel "The Plague" -- sales of which have ticked upward during the Covid-19 crisis - French author Albert Camus reflects on the nature of outbreak and its relation to the human capacity for surprise: "Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet, always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise."
Tags: News, Stories, Albert Camus, Agatha Christie Frederick Douglass

Author Phuc Tran talks about his Vietnamese-American coming of age story in ‘Sigh, Gone’

When his family left Saigon for the United States, Phuc Tran, then an infant, cried so much that his family had to exit the bus they’d intended to take and wait for another one. It was a fateful decision; that first bus exploded and everyone on board died. While Tran’s new memoir “Sigh, Gone” explores his subsequent life as an American-raised Gen X kid steeped in pop culture, the book’s roots come from a TEDx talk that Tran gave in 2012. The longtime Latin teacher and tattoo artist discussed gra...
Tags: Books, Sport, Things To Do, Soccer, Pennsylvania, United States, Npr, Albert Camus, Lawrence Wright, Saigon, Malcolm X, Luke, Tran, Dustin Nguyen, Phuc, Top Stories LADN

Camus’s Inoculation Against Hate

Writing “The Plague” during the decimation of World War II, Albert Camus used disease as a metaphor for war — but also for war’s remedy.
Tags: News, Algeria, Albert Camus, Albert, Camus, Books and Literature, World War II (1939-45, Quarantines, Translation and Interpreters, The Plague (Book, Inoculation Against Hate

How Can Boccaccio’s 14th Century Decameron Help Us Live Through COVID-19?

I remember reading selections of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron in my early high school years—and I remember reading them as light, bawdy tales about aristocrats in gardens. We were briefly introduced to the frame narrative, set amidst the 1348 outbreak of plague in Florence, which killed off half the city’s population. But the Black Death seemed almost mythological in scope—a phantom on the periphery. As Albert Camus writes in The Plague, a book also appearing on bestseller and recommen...
Tags: Google, College, Edgar Allan Poe, Italy, Literature, Albert Camus, Florence, New Statesman, Facebook Twitter, Nicolas, Josh Jones, Spicer, Florentines, Boccaccio, Durham NC Follow, Andre Spicer

Wuhan ends lockdown; Virus strains medical workers to limits

By DANICA KIRKA AND ELENA BECATOROS LONDON — After 76 days in lockdown, the Chinese city at the heart of the global pandemic reopened Wednesday and tens of thousands immediately hopped on trains and planes to leave. Elsewhere, the economic, political and psychological toll of fighting the virus grew increasingly clear and more difficult to bear. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spent a second night in intensive care, the first major world leader confirmed to have COVID-19. His condition was ...
Tags: Health, Business, Japan, New York, London, News, Supreme Court, California, Washington, France, China, Uncategorized, Spain, Sport, World news, Beijing

A 1665 Advertisement Promises a “Famous and Effectual” Cure for the Great Plague

There is a level of avarice and depravity in defrauding victims of an epidemic that should shock even the most jaded. But a look into the archives of history confirms that venal mountebanks and con artists have always followed disaster when it strikes. In 1665, the Black Death reappeared in London, a disease that had ravaged medieval Europe for centuries and left an indelible impression on cultural memory. After the rats began to spread disease, terror spread with it. Then came the advertisemen...
Tags: Google, Asia, Europe, London, College, Edgar Allan Poe, History, Bbc, Current Affairs, Italy, Albert Camus, Facebook Twitter, Owens, Josh Jones, Gile, Durham NC Follow

Lessons from ‘La Peste’: Camus and Covid-19

‘The Plague’, an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France in World War II, is about a town’s fight against an epidemic. It’s a relevant read in the times of Covid-19 The post Lessons from ‘La Peste’: Camus and Covid-19 appeared first on The Mail & Guardian.
Tags: Opinion, France, Aids, Article, Albert Camus, La Peste, Camus, Pandemic, Top Six, The Plague, Coronavirus, Coronavirus outbreak, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, COVID-19, Middle East Respiratory System

What is Albert Camus’ The Plague About? An Introduction

Topping lists of plague novels circulating these days, Albert Camus’ 1947 The Plague (La Peste), as many have been quick to point out, is about more than its blunt title would suggest. The book incorporates Camus’ experience as editor-in-chief of Combat, a French Resistance newspaper, and serves as an allegory for the spread of fascism and the Nazi occupation of France. It also illustrates the evolution of his philosophical thought: a gradual turn toward the primacy of the absurd, and aw...
Tags: Google, Europe, Books, London, College, France, China, Literature, Philosophy, Albert Camus, Lombardy, Facebook Twitter, Sartre, Constantinople, Josh Jones, Defoe

Re-reading Camus’s The Plague in pandemic times

Sometime in the 194 0s in the sleepy c olonial city of Oran, in French occupied Algeria ,  there  was an outbreak of p lague.   First rats died, then people .  Within days, the  e n tire  city was quarantined: it  was impossible to get out, and  no one could get in . This is the fictional  setting for  Albert Camus’s  second  most famous novel,  The Plague   (1947) .  And yes,   there are some similarities  to  our current situation with the  c oronavirus .  F...
Tags: Books, Featured, France, China, US, Literature, Philosophy, Algeria, Albert Camus, Oran, Camus, Arts & Humanities, Very Short Introductions, 20th Century Philosophy, 20th Century Literature, The Plague

Pandemic Literature: A Meta-List of the Books You Should Read in Coronavirus Quarantine

Describing conditions characteristic of life in the early 21st century, future historians may well point to such epidemic viral illnesses as SARS, MERS, and the now-rampaging COVID-19. But those focused on culture will also have their pick of much more benign recurring phenomena to explain: topical book lists, for instance, which crop up in the 21st-century press at the faintest prompting by current events. As the coronavirus has spread through the English-speaking world over the past month, pa...
Tags: Google, Facebook, Europe, Books, London, College, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, History, Literature, Guardian, Margaret Atwood, Albert Camus, Seoul, Florence, Michael Crichton

Download Classic Works of Plague Fiction: From Daniel Defoe & Mary Shelley, to Edgar Allan Poe

The apotheosis of prestige realist plague film, Steven Soderburgh’s 2011 Contagion, has become one of the most popular features on major streaming platforms, at a time when people have also turned increasingly to books of all kinds about plagues, from fantasy, horror, and science fiction to accounts that show the experience as it was in all its ugliness—or at least as those who experienced it remembered the events. Such a work is Daniel Defoe’s semi-fictional history “A Journal of the Plague Ye...
Tags: Google, Europe, Books, London, College, Edgar Allan Poe, History, Britain, Moscow, Literature, Isaac Newton, Algeria, Albert Camus, Catherine, Marseilles, Lisbon

We need to be physically distant, but we need to share our collective pain | Tim Costello

The wave of illness and death brought on by coronavirus is only beginning. How do we prepare for the sadness that will be thrust upon us? • Join Tim Costello as he gives the inaugural Australia at Home lunchtime briefing at 1pm Like many people, I am re-reading The Plague by Albert Camus. I haven’t picked it up for years.“The first thing the plague brought to our town was exile ... It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile – that sensation of a void within which never left us ... they drifted thro...
Tags: Health, Australia, Religion, Society, Australia news, Charities, Voluntary sector, Christianity, Albert Camus, Tim Costello, Coronavirus outbreak