The Great Courses

The great Bohemian-born composer Gustav Mahler once said, "A symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything." Over the course of its nearly 300-year life, the symphony has indeed embraced almost every trend to be found in Western concert music.

This is a 36-lecture course, each lecture being thirty minutes in length. The subject is fascinating, and Lerer is obviously learned and highly articulate if intermittently frustratingly dry and pedantic, nevertheless, to the listener's relief, often highly witty as well.

When you hear the words “healthy food,” it’s all too easy to think of bland, uninspired, or unfamiliar food that takes all the pleasure out of cooking and eating. What often prevents us from practicing healthy eating habits: the wealth of misinformation out there about what foods are healthy and the idea that we have to sacrifice the flavor that makes food such an enjoyable part of life.

Economies are deeply complex systems. The global marketplace—even national, state and local economies—involve many economic actors behaving in rational and irrational ways, sustaining a dizzying array of interconnected activity. Because of the number of participants involved in this global exchange, the unpredictability of their actions, and the sheer variety of possible actions, some degree of economic uncertainty is inevitable.