A Calendar of Wisdom: Tolstoy on Knowledge and the Meaning of Life. By Maria Popova “The most important knowledge is that which guides the way you lead your life.” On March 15, 1884, Leo Tolstoy, wrote in his diary: I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people. So he set out to compile “a wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people” — a florilegium five centuries after the golden age of florilegia and a Tumblr a century and a half before the golden age of Tumblr, a collection of famous words on the meaning of life long before the concept had become a cultural trope.
The following year, he wrote to his assistant, describing the project: Armenian sculptor Sergei Dmitrievich Merkurov (1881-1952) working on his statue of Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy spent the next seventeen years collecting those pieces of wisdom. Tolstoy writes in the introduction: Beware of false knowledge.
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Yale University Press, 368 pp., $27.50 Privacy and Big Data: The Players, Regulators and Stakeholders by Terence Craig and Mary E. The Age of the Permanent Intern | People & Politics. In so many ways, Kate, who was born in 1987, is a perfect reflection of the opportunities and hardships of being young today. She’s smart and motivated and has a degree from an Ivy League school, yet at 25 she worries she’ll never attain the status or lifestyle of her boomer parents. She majored in political science and has a burnished social conscience, something she honed teaching creative writing in a women’s prison. But Kate’s most salient—and at this point, defining—generational trait might be that she doesn’t have a full-time job.
Instead, she has been an intern for a year and a half. Kate moved to DC after dropping out of her first year of law school. “I don’t mean to sound like I have an ego, but I am an intelligent, hard-working person,” Kate says. It’s a refrain heard many times from the millions of twentysomething Kates who are scrambling to find jobs with a steady paycheck and benefits. Welcome to the slow, sputtering economic recovery, Generation Y. In a word, no.