The next four years I spent as an entirely uninterested high school student. Shakespeare’s Julius ­Caesar, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, a few essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, all offered as part of the required school curriculum, none of them so much as laid a glove on me. Willa Cather, a writer I have come to admire as the greatest twentieth-century American novelist, chose not to allow any of her novels put into what she called “school editions,” lest young students, having to read her under the duress of school assignments, never return to her books when they were truly ready for them. She was no dope, Miss Cather.

Only after I had departed high school did books begin to interest me, and then only in my second year of college, when I transferred from the University of Illinois to the University of Chicago. Among the most beneficial departures from standard college fare at the University of Chicago was the brilliant idea of eliminating textbooks from undergraduate study. This meant that instead of reading, in a thick­ textbook, “In his Politics Aristotle held . . . ,” or “In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud argued . . . ,” or “In On Liberty John Stuart Mill asserted . . . ,” students read the Politics, Civilization and Its Discontents, On Liberty, and a good deal else. Not only read them, but, if they were like me, became excited by them. Heady stuff, all this, for a nineteen-year-old semi-literate who, on first encountering their names, was uncertain how to pronounce Proust or Thucydides.

Along with giving me a firsthand acquaintance with some of the great philosophers, historians, novelists, and poets of the Western world, the elimination of that dreary, baggy-pants middleman called the textbook gave me the confidence that I could read the most serious of books. Somehow it also gave me a rough sense of what is serious in the way of reading and what is not. Anyone who has read a hundred pages of Herodotus senses that it is probably a mistake—that is, a waste of your finite and therefore severely limited time on earth—to read a six-­hundred-page biography of Bobby Kennedy, unless, that is, you can find one written by Xenophon.

What is the true point of a bookish life? Note I write “point,” not “goal.” The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end….

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The Bookish Life: How to Read and Why https://t.co/ebpvDv9Aya pic.twitter.com/H3AlslUYwU

— Huy Vo (@huyvohcmc) October 23, 2018

The seven-time congressman is known as an apologist for the 1964-85 military dictatorship, for endorsing torture and for making disparaging remarks about homosexuals, women and black people.

But the majority of voters do not appear to care about these threats. They want to use him as a wrecking ball to demolish what they see as a hopelessly corrupt and incompetent political establishment, starting with the PT. Many view his less savoury remarks as a refreshing change from the fussy political correctness associated with the left.

“He has become a point of convergence for innumerable and diverse points of dissatisfaction with a political system that is rotten to the core,” says Daniel Aarão Reis, a professor of contemporary history at Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niterói.

Whatever the reasons for his likely victory, observers are divided over whether a Bolsonaro presidency will threaten one of Brazil’s most hard-won achievements — its democracy. In style at least, Mr Bolsonaro echoes many of the traits of the populists who have prospered around the world in recent years, from Turkey and Russia to the Philippines.

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Bolsonaro's an apologist for dictatorship and disparages minorities, but a majority of voters apparently don't care. They want him to demolish hopelessly corrupt and incompetent political establishment, starting with Workers Party. https://t.co/SXXx1xjca1 via @financialtimes

— Juan Forero (@WSJForero) October 25, 2018

“Together we are going to end the scourge of drug addiction in America,” President Donald Trump said on Wednesday, as he signed a new bill to tackle the country’s opioid epidemic.

Authorities have seized enough fentanyl to kill every single American. It’s a crisis that lines one major highway. These are the stories of Interstate-95.

Watch it all (about 13 1/2 minutes).

A kilo of fentanyl worth $5,000 in China makes a $1.5m profit when sold in the US illegally https://t.co/jPTpbKL2uc

— BBC North America (@BBCNorthAmerica) October 25, 2018

Don’t become an ordinand unless you are well-off, that was the message of a new report released by the Church of England.

The Living Ministry research follows cohorts of 85 ordinands and clergy through their ministry over a decade.

According to the report, non-residential ordinands who started training in retirement, maintaining their pension drawings or those who retain an adequate salary even after a reduction in working hours to fit in training,report the best financial wellbeing.

This is the same for those whose main household income is their partner’s (about two thirds are reliant to some extent on income from their partner).

One male participant reported:“I think actually [the Church has]probably got it bang on that that is what you need to live on, because I can live on that, but it is so tight that anything extra that comes up, you’ve got no way of doing anything.”

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Most Holy God, whose servant Tabitha thou didst raise from the dead to display thy power and confirm thy message that thy Son is Lord; grant unto us thy grace, that aided by her prayers and example, we may be given a new life in thy Spirit to do works pleasing in thy sight; Through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord; who livest and reignest with thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

“Now there was in Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which, translated, means Dorcas. She was full of good works and acts of charity.” – Acts 9:36 @ESVBible pic.twitter.com/XEEq1aoatG

— Joshua Rystedt (@JoshuaRystedt) October 25, 2017

O God, in obedience to thy command, I surrender myself to thee this day, all that I am and all that I have, to be unconditionally thine for thy using. Take me from myself and use me as thou wilt, where thou wilt, when thou wilt, with whom thou wilt; for Christ’s sake.

–Robert W. Rodenmayer, ed., The Pastor’s Prayerbook: Selected and arranged for various occasions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960)

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?”And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”

But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

–Luke 10:25-37