End of Semester (Blues)

Notes from the classroom, plus book club on Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon

My class! I love their expressions. Roughly two-thirds is Taiwanese, and the rest come from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, South Korea, France, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, the U.S., Paraguay, Mongolia, and Hungary.

Michelle and Albert here. We just finished a semester of teaching, phew! I taught two courses this semester, one on creative expression, at a women’s juvenile detention center in Taipei and the other, on storytelling and the law, at National Chengchi University, where I teach at the International College of Innovation. (I hope to write about the former, but I need to sort out my thoughts about it.) Albert taught a course called “Radical European Thought,” which was basically a modern intellectual history class. (“It was a mistake to end on Freud,” he told me, shaking his head sadly, when he came home from the last day of the semester. “Freud’s too pessimistic.”) We have been thinking a lot about Freud and how his insights take on a new resonance in middle …