Robert Zaretsky

Robert Zaretsky teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston. He is the author most recently of Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague.

Silent Partner

The union that may have made possible a writer’s late flourishing

By Robert Zaretsky | Tuesday September 3, 2024

Nights at the Opera

Long before he wrote his masterly novels, Stendhal was transformed by the power of music

By Robert Zaretsky | Thursday August 15, 2024

Iris as Pupil

Before this canonical English writer published novels, she was a student of French postwar philosophy

By Robert Zaretsky | Friday March 1, 2024

A State of Perpetual Unease

Sartre’s essay on French anti-Semitism cast the problem in existential terms

By Robert Zaretsky | Friday December 15, 2023

Thought Experimenters

Making sense of a broken world

By Robert Zaretsky | Monday November 27, 2023

The Decreationist

Simone Weil’s thoughts on the unmaking of the self

By Robert Zaretsky | Thursday August 24, 2023

Just Imagine

Adam Smith on the faculty that makes us human

By Robert Zaretsky | Monday June 5, 2023

Putting the Story Back in History

Hayden White on truth, facts, and the allure of a well-told tale

By Robert Zaretsky | Thursday June 1, 2023

The Friend Zone

Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas on what makes a marriage tick were downright radical for their time

By Robert Zaretsky | Sunday February 19, 2023

Words, Words, Words

What does the advent of ChatGPT mean for already beleaguered teachers?

By Robert Zaretsky | Thursday January 12, 2023

The Affair Rekindled

By Robert Zaretsky | Thursday August 11, 2022

Meditations on Marcus

By Robert Zaretsky | Saturday August 8, 2020

The Bloom Has Faded

By Robert Zaretsky | Monday June 22, 2020

Love in the Time of Camus

By Robert Zaretsky | Thursday May 14, 2020

The Long 20th Century of Terror

By Robert Zaretsky | Thursday August 18, 2016

The Fabulist

By Robert Zaretsky | Tuesday March 11, 2014

My Life as a Door

By Robert Zaretsky | Friday June 1, 2012

Plunging to Earth

By Robert Zaretsky | Friday June 3, 2011

Giving Absurdity Its Due

By Robert Zaretsky | Monday March 1, 2010

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