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Brian Kaller

Articles by Brian Kaller

Silage and the Silence of the Corncrake

I’ve been talking to elderly friends here in the Irish countryside about what they used to do when the sun shone. The answer, of course, was that they made hay.

The End of Childhood Play

Too many children grow up learning no lessons, organising no peers, and exploring no territory, unless it be shifting electrons around a screen, and the screen becomes their world.

Growing Up Stoic

For our home-schooling lessons my daughter and I have been reading Greek and Roman philosophers, and she has taken a shine to the Stoics – not only reading them with…

An Athenian Coup, or Slapstick Bedtime Story?

For tonight’s lesson, I said to my ten-year-old, tell me how the first democracy was created. “Sure,” she said, remembering our lessons past. “It was in Athens, about 2,500 years…

Comedians in Togas

The Greeks were funny. We don’t usually think of them that way; we think of them as marbled patriarchs in togas, Really Important Men We Revere for Some Reason. Admittedly,…

Conversations with Bronze Age Warlords

Pop quiz: What ancient Greek legend begins with the kidnapping of Helen of Troy, and ends with Greeks sneaking into Troy inside a hollow wooden horse? If you said “The…

The Real Social Network

The other night I saw the end of a life well-lived. I didn’t know him; I just saw his funeral. My bus rolled through the dark night I was riding…

Horse Burgers and the Lives of Others

If you could boil our global problems down to seven words, they might be these: we don’t see where stuff comes from. Most of us grew up staring at glowing…

Classic Cinema and Our Future

I want to see films for all ages, devoid of hip countercultural irony. I want to see low-budget teleplays in which today’s equivalent of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland put…

Homewreckers

County Kildare, Ireland. A couple I know – we’ll call them Bob and Nancy -- lived in a century-old house in the middle of their town, a few miles from…