A devoted J.R.R. Tolkien fan from an early age, Thiel is equally enamored with Kirill Eskov's The Last Ringbearer, a retelling of The Lord of the Rings in which Sauron is a beleaguered victim and the elves are bellicosely bent on world domination. "Gandalf's the crazy person who wants to start a war," Thiel explains, "and Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it's all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works. Anyway, it's really clever."

As John Cowper Powys noted in The Meaning of Culture, culture (vs. mere education) is how you put what you've learned to work in your own life, seeing the world around you more deeply because of the historical, literary, artistic and philosophical resonances that current experiences evoke. Classical stories come often to my mind, and provide guides to action (much as Plutarch intended his histories of famous men to be guides to morality and action). The classics are part of my mental toolset, the context I think with.

This is an article by Tim O'Reilly on how to think and learn. Ignore the title. You must read this entire article; it will improve your life.

Writing recently in The Nation, none other than a Yale English professor—William Deresiewicz—painfully bemoaned the “dying” state of literary studies. Colleges are hiring fewer and fewer English profs to teach fewer and fewer English students. Meanwhile, observes Deresiewicz, university priorities are “shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money.”

Remake literary studies with a firmer scientific foundation, so that the field can generate reproducible knowledge rather than running around in theoretical circles.

In this atmosphere, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find another literary scholar, Washington and Jefferson College’s Jonathan Gottschall, unveiling a seemingly radical proposal: Remake literary studies with a firmer scientific foundation, so that the field can generate reproducible knowledge rather than running around in theoretical circles.