Good articles...

...I re-subscribed to Atlantic on your recommendation a while ago, after some years away.

Grammar, rhetoric, and logic--the "trivium." We are a verbal species, and our interpersonal relations rely greatly on words--expressed as sounds, written symbols, or signed gestures.

Arithemetic, astronomy, music, geometry--the "quadrivium." We understand our world largely through numbers and their relationships, whether tuning a keyboard to just temperament, analyzing petabytes of galactic spectrographic data, parsing genetic codes, or solving optimization problems in economics.

I can't try to calculate an ROI on being good at words and numbers, but I would err on the side of understanding versus ignorance. The 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics mentioned in the story about David Shribman would have been a good world to explore, even if now a bit dated.