A Tribute to Peter Green

Peter Green, renowned classics scholar and novelist, passed away on September 16, 2024. A longtime author and translator for University of California Press, he was best known for his landmark authoritative works on ancient history, focusing particularly on Homer, the Greco-Persian Wars, Alexander the Great, and the Hellenistic Age. 

The Trouble with Passion, selected as an FT best book of 2021

Probing the ominous side of career advice to “follow your passion,” this data-driven study explains how the passion principle fails us and perpetuates inequality by class, gender, and race; and it suggests how we can reconfigure our relationships to paid work.
“Follow your passion” is a popular mantra for career decision-making in the United States. Passion-seeking seems like a promising path for avoiding the potential drudgery of a life of paid work, but this “passion principle”—seductive as it is—does not universally translate. The Trouble with Passion reveals the significant downside of the passion principle: the concept helps culturally legitimize and reproduce an exploited, overworked white-collar labor force and broadly serves to reinforce class, race, and gender segregation and inequality.

Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History

Afghanistan is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how a land conquered and ruled by foreign dynasties for more than a thousand years became the “graveyard of empires” for the British and Soviets, and what the United States must do to avoid a similar fate.