In Search of Lost Time and Past History

What Marcel Proust can teach us about how to live.

A. You can see all of Yale University’s Power and Politics in Today’s World (2025/26) online for free, created and delivered by Professor Ian Shapiro. His lectures deal with how the post-1989 (circa Cold War end and aftermath) world came into being. You can enrol in Professor Shapiro’s Coursera course Moral Foundations of Politics, which starts today. There are lots of free Coursera courses too - such as Princeton University sociologist Professor Miguel Centeno’s Paradoxes of War that has just begun.

B. NATO’s Allied Special Operations Forces Command (SOFCOM) has a training catalogue and calendar that is very useful to help understand comparatively what the US Special Operations Delta Force has recently been up to in Venezuela. If you are either not NATO authorised personnel or a NATO SOF Special Operator with access privileges then you can use Generative AI to build your own syllabus from the text prompts. Or you could ask David Cole in The New York Review of Books.

C. Gen Z has seemingly outdone Gen X and turned life into multiple income streams.

D. ABC’s Listen has a new (Nassim Nicholas Taleb influenced) Black Swan series whose first episode is on The Population Bomb (which the environmentalist Paul R. Ehrlich shaped in the 1960s).

E. Artistic, creative literature may have prophetic qualities that may help us (existentially) to understand the society that we live in - and to grasp how power and social change is currently unfolding.

F. Joel Kotkin writes for Quillette on the housing crisis in the United States.

G. What being a wildlife carer in Australia is really like (thank you for all of your hard work and personal sacrifice).

H. The craft of how to write effectively (from the University of Chicago) as a communication and interpersonal skill for cultivating leadership.

I. How the author and philosopher Marcel Proust can change your life.