Category: Humor
We’re excited that you’ve joined the conversation! At HMU, we want to continue the great authors’ conversations in a contemporary context, and this blog will help us do that. We look back to Aristotle and the early philosophers who used reason and discourse to gain wisdom and now we endeavor to do the same every day.
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June 16, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. For me, reading Rabelais was slow going. Crawling through the text, however, brought moments of joy as I saw strains of other, later works. The past few blogs attempted to highlight some of those connections as a way to bridge the gap between …
June 9, 2023 Thanks to Chad Greene, a 2023 Fellow in Ideas recipient, for today’s blog. Depending on your concentrations, perhaps you have read enough about probability and statistics to dissuade you from playing the types of lotteries states tend to sponsor, such as MegaMillions or Powerball. But, in my own reading of one of …
Have a Difficult Decision to Make? Have a Copy of Virgil or Homer Handy? Read More »
June 2, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Last week’s blog (https://hmu.edu/2023-5-26-reading-rabelais-part-ii/) concluded with a suggested connection between Book Two of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and Monty Python skits. We cannot stop at the end of Book Two, however. Moving into Book Three, we find a lengthy discussion between Pantagruel and …
May 19, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. I remember my first experience with Chaucer. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, I tried reading his stories in the original Middle English and was very disoriented. Of course, I had a lot of footnotes to rely on, but these also overwhelmed …
December 9, 2022 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. As we enter the season of Scrooge, I couldn’t resist a comparison of Molière’s The Miser with David Hume’s musings on wealth. In A Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1740, David Hume explains that wealth provides humans with a unique sort of …
August 19, 2022 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. By this time of the summer, I am always awash in fruit. I love it…and I hate it. Harvesting your own produce is time sensitive, messy, and exhausting. Yet there is nothing that I love better in this world than homemade peach pie …
October 29, 2021 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. When Gulliver travels to Brobdingnag, he describes many things with disgust. Therefore, it seems fitting, for a Halloween treat, to revisit some of Swift’s grotesque elements from the world of Brobdingnag. If you find this overly terrifying, keep in mind that Gulliver survives …
October 8, 2021 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. During the 90s, Seinfeld garnered a huge viewership. In an attempt to bring the classics to the present, our recent Quarterly Discussion drew connections between Seinfeld and Aristotle’s Poetics. We also tried to discover keys to the sitcom’s great appeal. Considering the characters’ …
October 4, 2019 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. In a 2014 interview with David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld says that he was inspired to create Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee to play with a new format, something that could be viewed on a phone. This occurred to him at a time when …
October 5, 2018 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Spoiler alert: if you are midway through The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, maybe you should bookmark this post because I am going to talk about her character development throughout the first season. If you are not yet familiar with this show, The Marvelous Mrs. …
