Becoming Stoic
About
A reading club that meets on the page
Twelve-week seasons on one primary text, run in public, free, with the source texts kept open alongside the writing.
Becoming Stoic is a publication and a real reading club. Each season runs twelve weeks on one primary text, read in the order it was written. A passage is due every Sunday, an essay is published every Tuesday, and a recorded discussion goes up every Friday.
Why slowly
Most people meet these books as quotations. Quotation is what the Meditations survives least well: it was a private notebook, and the lines that read best in isolation are usually the ones the surrounding pages complicate. Reading a book at twenty pages a week, in order, with other people, produces a different relationship to it than a list of aphorisms does.
What it costs
Nothing. The translations we read most closely are in copyright and we tell you which edition to buy, but every text we publish here is public domain, and every recording stays up.
Who writes it
The close-reading series and the Friday discussions are led by Daniel Okrent. The objections series is written by Priya Raghunathan, whose job is to argue that the week’s essay is wrong.