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Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?

The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.

most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.

Please note: This is a special Lesson of the Day that brings together many different sources and ideas. Unlike our usual format, this is written to teachers, not students.

Then, in an extensive Going Further section, we have rounded up many contributions from teachers in the United States across subjects and levels who describe ways they are helping their students understand this conflict and its roots and effects.We hope that no matter what you teach, there is something here you can use.

Do Volodymyr’s actions surprise you? Why do you think The Times might have included this specific detail of this family’s story? What do you think it says about the power and importance of education, and the role it plays in young people’s lives, even amidst an ongoing war?

William Sellick pinched the tiny scarlet petals with deft ease, turning them into paper poppies and pressing them into a wreath. The flowers are a potent symbol of remembrance and patriotism that sprang up in the aftermath of World War I to honor the war dead and raise funds for survivors.

Each handmade flower evokes the image of poppies springing up from destruction and decay in Belgium’s Flanders Fields, home to many of the Great War’s bloodiest battlefields. The haunting scene was immortalized in a war poem by Canadian army doctor John McCrae: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses row on row.”

For Sellick, who suffered combat stress after an army tour to Northern Ireland in the 1970s, making poppies is a way to move on from a life shadowed by depression and alcoholism. He doesn’t like to recall his army days, but every November he makes an effort to help plant crosses decorated with poppies outside London’s Westminster Abbey.

he centenary of World War One means the work of the British war poets has been much quoted of late. But the reputation of writers critical of the war, such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, grew mainly after 1918

"But at the same time the poets needed to express opinions to resonate with the public. If some of the poems now appear jingoistic, that probably echoes how many people saw the world a century ago.

A century ago it was still common for magazines and newspapers to publish poems inspired by great public occasions.

Who was Homer? How did he make his poems? Were the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” even produced by the same person? In the face of more than two millenniums of debate, Parry showed that these were the wrong questions. There was no ancient poet called “Homer,” he argued. Nor were the poems attributed to him “written” by any single individual. Rather, they were the product of a centuries-long tradition of poet-performers.

e traveled for 15 months to what was then Yugoslavia, and discovered guslars — or “singers of tales,” as he would call them — practicing a still-living oral tradition. Their songs of weddings and war performed in cafes (and, later, in a traveling studio of Parry’s devising) provided living proof that his theory about the composition of the Homeric epics was, in fact, possible in practice. In the process, he created a new audio device to record long songs on aluminum disks, now housed at Harvard University. This fieldwork marked, in the estimation of many, the beginning of the discipline of “sound studies,” showing that poetry could be song and epic, a performance.

Indeed, the very definition of “masculinity” is up for grabs

In 2019, the American Psychological Association published guidelines that took direct aim at what it called “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression” — declaring it to be, “on the whole, harmful.”

Aside from “dominance,” a concept with precious few virtuous uses, the other aspects of traditional masculinity the A.P.A. cited have important roles to play. Competitiveness, aggression and stoicism surely have their abuses, but they also can be indispensable in the right contexts. Thus, part of the challenge isn’t so much rejecting those characteristics as it is channeling and shaping them for virtuous purposes.

“Anyone who is critical of the tech industry always has someone yell at them ‘Luddite! Luddite!’ and I was no exception,” she told me. It was meant as an insult, but Crabapple embraced the term. Like many others, she came to self-identify as part of a new generation of Luddites. “Tech is not supposed to be a master tool to colonize every aspect of our being. We need to reevaluate how it serves us.”

on some key fronts, the Luddites are winning.

The government mobilized what was then the largest-ever domestic military occupation of England to crush the uprising—the Luddites had won the approval of the working class, and were celebrated in popular songs and poems—and then passed a law that made machine-breaking a capital offense. They painted Luddites as “deluded” and backward.

The Phaethon myth and Goethe’s poem fail to provide useful advice because they misconstrue the way humans gain power. In both fables, a single human acquires enormous power, but is then corrupted by hubris and greed. The conclusion is that our flawed individual psychology makes us abuse power.

What this crude analysis misses is that human power is never the outcome of individual initiative. Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans. Accordingly, it isn’t our individual psychology that causes us to abuse power.

Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. Humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way our networks are built predisposes us to use power unwisely