Do You Teach History?

After the ancient Greeks invented rhetoric, it helped create the world’s first democracies. Today, it gives a real purpose to a liberal education, pulling together all of a student’s knowledge while giving her the tools to inspire others.

Reading With Patrick explores questions that idealistic students who seek to tackle social injustice might be moved to ask: can you change a life? Is it arrogant to think you can? Perhaps even more deeply, students can ask: What is a human connection made of? Who do we choose to connect with? If two people are from unequal circumstances, is the connection compromised from the start?

Jhumpa Lahiri has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She will receive the $5,000 award and give a reading December 8 at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The 2017 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced on Monday and four Penguin Random House titles received the distinguished medal honoring excellence in Arts and Letters.

Hardwiring Happiness teaches lessons such as the central importance of psychological resources for effectiveness and well-being; coping with challenges; and managing vulnerabilities and also how inner resources are acquired through processes of learning.

Imbolo Mbue has been awarded the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her debut novel, Behold the Dreamers.

Heather Ann Thompson, an historian at the University of Michigan has won the 2017 Bancroft Prize in History for Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.

The New York City Department of Veterans’ Services and Department of Cultural Affairs named Bryan Doerries, Artistic Director of Theater of War Productions, as their Public Artist in Residence (PAIR).

The Nonfiction Windham Campbell Prize was awarded to Maya Jasanoff for her “brilliant historical writing [which] brings to life forgotten worlds and characters in richly textured narratives.”

The National Book Critics Circle will present awards to Margaret Atwood and Yaa Gyasi on March 16, 2017 at the New School.

John Berger, the British art critic, intellectual and prodigious author whose work redefined the way a generation saw art, died on January 2nd. He was 90.

Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It, by Larrie D. Ferreiro, was bestowed The Journal of American Revolution Book of the Year Award.