Robert D Zaretsky is professor in the Honors College at the University of Houston, a columnist at The Forward and a frequent contributor to several journals, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The American Scholar. His most recent book is Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague (2022); his previous book, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (2021), was named by The Times Literary Supplement as a Book of the Year.