The Latest Breaking News from Odysseus

The event, held in partnership with the University of Illinois Chicago, includes 13 hours of programming on Friday and Saturday. Volunteers will read the entirety of “The Odyssey” broken into short passages.

The theoretical physicist and author on boring his girlfriend with Tolstoy, the magic of Homer and making sense of Wittgenstein

Celebrations are a joyous time of reuniting with family and friends. But afterward, people can sometimes be left uneasily mulling over their relationships. Annual returns home can induce an uncomfortable nostalgia in the tension between how the past is remembered and how the present is experienced.

In The Odyssey, an almost 3,000-year-old epic attributed to a poet known as Homer, the soldier Odysseus narrates most adventures in retrospect. The poem, which tells of Odysseus’ return from the Trojan War, is both the origin of our concept of nostalgia (from the Greek nostos meaning the journey home)…