These Foolish Things
There are three kinds of fools: Real Fools, Professional Fools, and Unsuspecting Fools. The professional, a staple of Shakespeare’s plays, is, in reality, nobody’s fool.
continue readingMichael Dirda
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize–winning book columnist for the Washington Post and the author, most recently, of Classics for Pleasure (Harcourt).
Articles by Michael Dirda
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These Foolish Things
There are three kinds of fools: Real Fools, Professional Fools, and Unsuspecting Fools. The professional, a staple of Shakespeare’s plays, is, in reality, nobody’s fool.
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Why Mephistopheles Had to Work Overtime – Evil is glamorous. But great works of literature are more likely to end with scenes of reconciliation.
Virtues get no respect. Unlike sin and vice, which are loaded with razzmatazz, such qualities as temperance, chastity, and patience generally seem soberly straitlaced and lackluster. On the surface, they look to be all about self-control, which is useful, rather than self-expression, which is fun. The poet Swinburne told us this a long time ago when he spoke about the dark joy of exchanging “the lilies and languors of virtue/ for the raptures and roses of vice.”
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The Waiting Game: The struggle to find organ donors is more difficult with a less-than-generous public policy
On December 23, 1954, Richard Herrick got the most remarkable Christmas present from his identical twin brother: a kidney. Doctors at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston performed the first successful kidney transplant on the twenty-four-year-old Coast Guard veteran. Today, a painting by Joel Babb commemorating the operating-room scene hangs in the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School.
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