A century ago, the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and one of the founders of the NAACP, W.E.B. DuBois published The Gift of Black Folk, a book that was commissioned by the Catholic organization the Knights of Columbus, as part of a series intended to help Americans appreciate the contributions of minority groups.

DuBois was highly educated and an avid reader of great texts from Plato to Frederick Douglass. The irony of the present moment is that if DuBois were currently a student in a core philosophy class at Texas A&M University, he would be assigned only a redacted version of Plato's great work, The Republic.

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In a pivotal scene in the recent film A Complete Unknown, a young Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), celebrated as a voice of the 1960s protest movement, complains about the expectation that he should keep playing popular songs like "Blowin' in the Wind" for the rest of his life. The film, which covers Dylan's early career, culminates with his famous 1965 performance at the Newport Folk Festival, in which he repudiates both the acoustic musical style and the standard political content of the folk revival movement.

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In a pivotal scene in the critically acclaimed new film A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan, Dylan and an assembled group of band members are in the studio about to record "Like a Rolling Stone," the song that defines Dylan's career. The producer of the track is Tom Wilson, who is credited with helping both Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel make the transition from folk to rock and thus to international stardom.

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In his book God, Philosophy, Universities, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that "neither the university nor philosophy is any longer seen as engaging the questions" of "plain persons." These questions include: "What is our place in the order of things? Of what powers in the natural and social world do we need to take account? How should we respond to the facts of suffering and death? What is our relationship to the dead? What is it to live a human life well? What is it to live it badly?"

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Amid what was otherwise a disappointing summer season for Hollywood movies, Inside Out 2 was one of the few exceptions. A sequel that takes its main character Riley into puberty and features characters representing a wide range of Riley's emotions, the film is now the highest grossing in the history of Pixar. In what is rare for sequels, it is at least as entertaining as the first film and—what's more—it contains much wisdom about the nature of human emotions and the best response to anxiety, a problem afflicting not just teens but an increasingly high percentage of the entire population.

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