When I moved to India in 2007, I knew almost nothing about Indian food. Growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs in a typical middle-class family of Irish descent, Indian cuisine just was not on my radar. Going to college in New York City had been an unmatched opportunity to eat […]
I was on a mission to meet Louise Penny. But first, some background. I just returned from a thoroughly live-in-the-moment week at the annual Writers at Woody Point festival. The setting is spectacular — a tiny town of Crayola-coloured houses set at the end of a road on the shores […]
It’s not often that you get to stand on top of $2 billion. That’s the approximate value of the millions of Champagne bottles storied under the Avenue de Champagne, in the town of Épernay. And it’s not everywhere that you get to see 70 million years of history displayed before […]
Today Classical Pursuits talks with Rosemary Gould, who is leading our upcoming seminar The Devil Went Down to Moscow. Rosemary has been leading seminars for Classical Pursuits for many years, most recently at Toronto Pursuits, July 2024. She has a PhD in English literature from the University of Virginia. But […]
“Why don’t more people know about this place?” I left the Museum of the Liberation of Paris my mind racing in a dozen directions. In a week full of surprises, it was another moment of encountering the unexpected in Paris. Across the other side of Place Denfert-Rochereau, the same long […]
Whenever I’ve moved from one city to another, I have had to pack up my extensive (some would say inordinately so) library of books, and I often don’t get to revisit some of my favorite books for several years. And while I own multiple copies of some texts, the ones […]
There is something I believe about literature: Nonfiction allows us to learn about stuff, but fiction allows us to learn about us. Reading fiction can help us to become better people. It fosters our senses of empathy and sympathy. If we think about and try to understand the motives of […]
Although Charles Dodgson died over a century ago, his alter ego Lewis Carroll is still very much alive. Alive as the young in heart are forever alive. The longevity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass leads us to ask — is there greatness to humour, any […]
[Editor’s note: We’re so happy to welcome Rosemary Gould back to Toronto Pursuits for the first time since 2019. She’ll be leading The Storytellers, an exploration of narrative, drama, and storytelling in poetry. In this blog post she introduces her approach to discussing poetry. For many years, Rosemary has turned […]
Just give me the facts, I can figure it out from there. For a long time, this is how many people have approached the news. Although the history of journalism shows that it’s an ever-changing concept, AI researcher and data scientist Jonathan Stray suggests that “factual reports of current events” […]