Nadya Williams

1 week ago | rlo.acton.org | Nadya Williams

In December 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. My family had left just a few months earlier to immigrate to Israel from Leningrad—which reverted post-collapse to its pre-revolutionary name of St. Petersburg. For many who stayed behind, the experience was disorienting to an extreme degree. The world as they had known it simply ceased to exist overnight.

1 week ago | ifstudies.org | Nadya Williams

Almost every morning this academic year, once the final remains of breakfast have been cleared away, I sit on the couch with my six-year-old daughter to read. Or, to be more precise, we practice spelling out and reading simple words from the trusty old McGuffey reader, popular in the 19th century.

1 week ago | nadyawilliams.substack.com | Nadya Williams

I know, it’s Monday! I don’t usually send anything out on a Monday. But today I’m writing with a crowdsourcing reflection/request. A little over a year ago, I wrote an exhortation that we read beautiful books to children for Ecstatic, the weekend edition of Ekstasis magazine. My argument, in part, was:We sometimes forget this, living in our pressure-cooker industrial-paced world, but we all, as human beings, have been created to crave and love beauty.

1 week ago | nadyawilliams.substack.com | Nadya Williams

Endings are difficult. Currentconcluded publication a week ago, so I have caught myself wondering several times this past week if I am forgetting to do something. No, it doesn’t seem that I am. It’s just that one significant responsibility has ended. I have started another editorial position, and I’ll tell you more about it soon. But I have other news this week.

2 weeks ago | mereorthodoxy.com | Nadya Williams

Homer, The Odyssey. Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. University of Chicago Press, 2025. $39.00, 560 pp. In the fall semester of the year 2000, I took a seminar on Homer’s Iliad. The math was simple: the Iliad has 24 books, and the semester has a little over 12 weeks. Moving at the pace of two books per week much of the fall, we read the entire epic. In the original Greek. In a building located just steps away from the statue of Homer on the University of Virginia’s legendary Lawn.