World of Consumers, How to Be a Stoic, Benefits of Nostalgia

Frank Trentmann, Ph.D.,  is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. His many publications include Free Trade Nation which won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize in 2009. His latest book is Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First with several foreign translations appearing in 2017. Things, things, and more things. Today we live in a world where all we do is consume more than we ever have before.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  Frank Trentmann explains the history of consumerism and how human behavior has changed over time.

Massimo Pigliucci, Ph.D., is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. He has a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Tennessee. His research interests include the philosophy of biology, the relationship between science and philosophy, the nature of pseudoscience, and the practical philosophy of Stoicism. Whenever we worry about what to eat, how to love, or simply how to be happy, we are worrying about how to lead a good life. No goal is more elusive. In How to Be a Stoic, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci offers Stoicism, the ancient philosophy that inspired the great Emperor Marcus Aurelius, as the best way to attain it. Stoicism is a sensible philosophy that focuses our attention on what is possible and gives us perspective on what is unimportant

Krystine Batcho, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College and is a licensed psychologist.  She began researching nostalgia in 1995. Her research includes nostalgia, memory, emotion and the influence of social media.   All of us are guilty at one point or another of thinking about the “good ‘ole days.”  Often, thinking about simpler times can give us a nice break from whatever is going on at the moment.  But, can nostalgia be dangerous?  Krystine Batcho explains why nostalgia can be both good and bad.