Although a lot of fun to play, Go isn't as realistic as another ancient strategy game, the Viking "Hnefatafl," in which one of the two sides is the attacker and the other merely vies to help its own King escape.]]>

It's curious how, when people list the Ivy League schools, they tend to forget Dartmouth.]]>

Aristotle rose to prominence not through his ideas but as the academic favored by the most powerful man in the world at the time, King Philip II of Macedonia. Philip II loved this unknown philosopher and fellow Macedonian so much that he chose Aristotle to be his son's tutor--and his son was Alexander the Great. Aristotle was a guy beloved by kings who conquered the world and spread his ideas.]]>

Rio de Janeiro is wonderful, but right across the bay is Niteroi, which is even better. The view of the city there is spectacular, and the Oscar Neimeyer museum is a real perk.]]>

Everyone goes to the French Riviera. The Italian Riviera is just as lovely, and so much more exclusive.

Smug source: Emmy]]>

The extreme degree to which Voltaire was hated by the great men of his era is surprising--hated even by the likes of Mozart, who wrote to his father after Voltaire's death, "the arch-scoundrel Voltaire has finally kicked the bucket."]]>

The Ivy League universities happen to be good schools, but academics has nothing to do with the Ivy League: the Ivy League was founded as a football league and still today remains merely an intercollegiate athletic league.]]>

Although the Tango greats like Carlos Gardel and Astor Piazzolla are first rate musicians, Tango doesn't capture the "everyday man in the street, letting himself go" sentiment as well as its oft-forgotten contemporary, the Murga, does. You can still see it, with its eccentric Carneval-like costumes and dances, in the provinces of Argentina and Uruguay today.]]>

Although Yale has a good law school, Yale itself can feel more like a retirement community for geniuses than a stimulating university: The great Yale faculty members get tenure there decades after doing their brilliant work elsewhere.]]>

Although Hume's classic Treatise on Human Nature is a key work of political philosophy to come out of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume's forgotten masterpiece Of the Standard of Taste, in which he argues that judging art is not arbitrary, is probably the most important work in aesthetics before Kant.]]>

Although Victor Hugo was a talented playwright, it is really his political activism that mattered. He could even be credited with the abolition of the death penalty in Switzerland.]]>

It is rather smug how Harvard alumni, when asked where they went to school, respond with, "In Boston."]]>

Amy Heckerling did a great job of updating Emma into Clueless, but she lost the powerful subtlety of Austin's novel by entirely eliminating certain things, like the character of Mrs. Weston -- the wise governess and Frank Churchill's mother.]]>

1984 and Animal Farm are classics, but a much more accurate portrayal of contemporary life than 1984's 'Big Brother' is the middle class despair captured in Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying.]]>

Caesar's pomposity -- such as his propensity for referring to himself, in his writings and accounts of his wars, as "Caesar" and not "I" or "me" -- makes him unbearable even today.]]>