Martin Cothran

Martin Cothran

Contributor

Martin Cothran is the editor of Classical Teacher magazine, published by Memoria Press, and the director of the Classical Latin School Association.

Recent blog posts by this author

What Putin is Doing Right... and What the West is Not Doing at All

This weekend's Wall Street Journal featured an interesting article about Hungary, a former Soviet bloc country that fled to NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is now moving closer to Putin's Russia. As the article mentions, it is one...

The Miss America Cover-Up: 'We are no longer a pageant'

First the Barbie makeover, now this. The Miss America Pageant announced last week that it will no longer be a pageant, a word which the Macmillan Dictionary defines as "a competition between young women in which judges...

A (Manageable) Summer Reading List for the Beach

At the beginning of summer, we often are treated to a spate of "Summer Reading" lists that we are supposed to read "at the beach." The trouble is, the lists are either so overstuffed with long books or are just so long that any attempt to read them...

Restaurants Are Giving People 'Option Paralysis'

The obsession with individual choice has wreaked havoc on many parts of our culture, but it has gone too far for some people, particularly those trying to order a sandwich. According to a recent Wall Street Journal story...

GQ Magazine Includes the Bible on its List of Books Not Worth Reading

A new article in GQ lists the“21 most overrated books ever.”Of the 21 books GQ lists that aren’t worth reading, one of them is the Bible. It’s enough to make you wonder if GQ is a magazine worth reading. The Bible gets the boot, along...

When ‘Civilization’ Became a Bad Word

Kenneth Clark's “Civilisation” mini-series, produced by the BBC and aired on American public television in 1969, celebrated the Western art and culture it depicted and explained. The show was one of the most widely watched and re-aired shows of...

The Lost Scrolls Lying at Our Feet

In 79 A.D., the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in eastern Italy covered nearby towns in ash and completely buried many of them. One of the towns that was buried in the eruption was Herculaneum, which at the time was a popular vacation spot...

Was Stephen Hawking Really Just a Computer?

Stephen Hawking once pronounced that he thought he was little more than a computer and that, because of this, he was unafraid to die. “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife...

Prominent Magazine Ranks America as a ‘Flawed Democracy’

The Economist magazine recently issued a study purporting to compare countries on the basis of how democratic they are. The U.S. ended up ranked as a “flawed democracy.” In one sense this is absolutely true. As great as America is, it will always...

The 5 Best Books on Education

There are a lot of books on education, but few that are very good. Here are five books that cut to the chase of what education is and how it should be done: 1) Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, by Werner Jaeger. Jaeger was a...