In 1980, the fledgling Entertainment and Sports Programming Network delivered the first live television coverage of the NFL draft. The draft would become one of the biggest events on ESPN’s and the NFL’s calendars and demonstrate to the emerging cable industry that talk sold – sometimes better than the thing being talked about. Chapter 5 recounts how ESPN, for years the leading cable channel, built a multibillion-dollar business by nurturing an obsession with scouting athletic giftedness. The talent talk allowed the network to bridge the two dominant racial ideologies of the time, color blindness and multiculturalism, and model for other cable networks and media how to turn commentary into mass entertainment.

The concluding chapter of this volume maps the contributions of the book as a whole, articulates possible future directions for further research, and offers a humanities lens to this conversation about youth mental health. Directions for further exploration include expanding the frame to encompass studies of affect and emotions (not just mental health), investigating the cultural politics of emotions (not just the importance of inner well-being) by situating emotions within political landscapes, enlarging the vocabulary of climate emotions (beyond the language of mental health), and queering climate emotions research.

This chapter looks at approximately a millennium of ancient reception, from factors pertaining to the writing and early circulation of Gorgias to the commentary on the work by Olympiodorus in the sixth century of our era. The dialogue was not written for light-hearted entertainment but as a vehicle for serious philosophy. Early readers must have included Plato’s rival Isocrates, whose Against the Sophists criticizes material early in the work, while inspiring 519b-d. Aristotle made extensive use of it in the Rhetoric, but may have thought its ethics superceded. A range of allusions in the spurious Alcibiades II strongly suggests that Gorgias was well-known by the late fourth century. It was widely read thereafter, thanks to rhetoricians and grammarians. Commentaries emerged from the Platonist schools, from Taurus to Olympiodorus, and may be supplemented from other philosophic discussion. Dodds had a low regard for Olympiodorus, taking little account of the task faced by the Alexandrian commentator. Some examples show how this view caused him to overlook places where Olympiodorus’ offers assistance, or even to misreport what he says. I conclude with the value of studying the ancient reception for enhancing our view of Plato.

The chapter ‘Concepts in Greek Mathematics’ by Reviel Netz problematises a set of assumptions commonly encountered in the literature on Greek mathematics, which typically derive from a supposedly objective, a-historical conception of mathematical theory and practice. In sharp opposition to that tradition, Netz raises the possibility that the purpose of engaging with mathematical concepts may have been different in antiquity than what it has been taken to be. He asks central questions afresh, for instance: why do mathematical texts begin with definitions, and what is the purpose of mathematical definitions and of axioms. In connection to these issues, he highlights new aspects of the relationship between Greek mathematics and Greek philosophy, between engaging with mathematical concepts and philosophical thinking. He also advances the thesis that the relations between mathematics and philosophy changed through the various eras of antiquity, as did mathematical concepts and the role of mathematical definitions. We should seriously entertain the idea that even mathematical concepts need to be viewed within a given historical and cultural context.

This chapter traces the transformation of the Persian poetic classics from a living textual corpus into a pantheon of heritage objects for the use of national literary institutions. Its focus is on the creation of national literatures for the Soviet eastern republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan from their establishment until the late Stalin period, but it shows how those literatures coevolved with Iranian and Turkish national canons, and with cosmopolitan and international post-Persianate canons. In its readings of the major classical poets Rudaki, Firdawsi, Khayyam, Nizami, Nava’i, and Bidil in modern anthologies, commentaries, and theatrical adaptations, the chapter emphasizes the asynchronous intervention of the classical poets themselves in their reception. The creation of these national literatures was a successful contestation of the representative authority of Western orientalists by national scholars, writers, and cultural officials, which would be widely imitated by postcolonial state cultural bureaucracies during the Cold War. The chapter’s central episodes are a series of anthologies published in Istanbul and Moscow in the early 1920s for Turcophone readerships; the founding Tajik anthology composed by Sadr al-Din ‘Ayni; the attack on the canon mounted by Central Asian radical folklorist–critics; and the Stalinist jubilees for classical Persianate poets.

The Cave analogy in Book 7 of the Republic admits of no single consistent interpretation. It communicates not one philosophical vision but two. One is developed in the initial narrative, which tells its own compelling story, dropping plenty of hints – varying in directness or mysteriousness – on how it is to be read. The other vision is articulated mostly in the philosophical commentary on the Cave that Plato’s Socrates supplies when he tells his interlocutor Glaucon how to decode it. We should take the commentary as enunciating inter alia a set of instructions not on what the narrative means as originally articulated, but on how it is to be reread as an allegory of the trainee philosopher’s education. The Cave as narrated begins as a moral and political allegory of the condition of ordinary people in the city – in the first instance, the democratic city – and of their need for redemption from it. The Cave as reinterpreted in philosophical commentary is an image of the reorientation of the soul which can be achieved by the practice of mathematics. Consistency of interpretation as between original narrative and subsequent commentary is therefore not mandatory.

The edition of all the papyri, with introduction, critical text, translation and line-by-line commentary. The manuscripts are grouped chronologically and not according to typology, from sub-chapters 5.1 to 5.8, 5.7. including the papyri of uncertain date, and 5.8. the unpublished items I inspected at the Beinecke Library.

What was literary theory in the Middle Ages? What was literary criticism? How did medieval scholars record their interpretations of texts? What forms did those interpretations take? And how do the forms of medieval literary criticism contribute to the shape of medieval literary theory? By teasing out answers to these questions from a series of examples of medieval (chiefly twelfth-century) commentary on classical literature, this chapter offers an introduction to the study of literary texts, its norms, assumptions, sources and priorities in the Latin Middle Ages. It concludes with an overview of the volume as a whole, focusing on how the various chapters relate to three overarching concepts: interpretation, invention and imagination.