Middlemarch is George Eliot’s (real name Mary Ann Evans) masterpiece. The 900-page Victorian novel is about the people living in a fictional English town in a time of enormous changes. In this e...
Richard Dawkins is best known as a formidable evolutionary biologist and biting critic of religion. But when he wants a break from polemics and proofs, he turns to P.G. Wodehouse for a belly laugh....
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” This famous line from The Leopard has become a shorthand for moments when a ruling order senses its own looming downfall. ...
According to Ryan Holiday, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer is like the better, more mature cousin to The Catcher in the Rye. In this episode, Shilo Brooks sits down with the author and Daily Stoic fou...
Most of us have read 1984 or Animal Farm. But fewer know of George Orwell’s first great work—an unvarnished account of his descent into the world of society’s outcasts. In this episode of Old Schoo...
It’s been 100 years since The Great Gatsby was published. In this episode, Shilo Brooks sits down with journalist Fareed Zakaria to explore why the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel still feels so modern.&...
Why do we believe what we believe? And how do those beliefs shape our politics? Thomas Sowell, one of the world’s most influential economists and social philosophers, set out to answer this ...
Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio is a dark, dazzling Italian fable that is worlds apart from Disney’s sanitized version. Beneath its fantasticism and humor, the story is brimming with po...
What is justice? And why should we live justly? These questions lie at the heart of Plato’s Republic, the foundational text of Western philosophy. In building his utopian city, Plato reveals how th...
Dr. Mike Israetel is a bodybuilder and scientist who believes reading is as important as a gym session. Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate changed his life. In this episode, Israetel joins Shilo Brook...
Few people have turned a love of the wild into a cultural force quite like Steve Rinella, the outdoorsman and author behind the MeatEater empire. Jim Harrison’s Wolf, published in 1971, changed Rin...
Admiral James Stavridis once commanded fleets as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Now he commands a collection of 5,000 rare books. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea changed Stavridis’ li...
Fewer of us than ever are reading books for pleasure. Shilo Brooks is on a mission to change that. Old School is a new podcast from The Free Press about great books and how reading them can make us...
