The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · first published 2002
10% recommend86% neutral5% critical
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…Pretty great but brutal. The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace: I really enjoyed it. It's ode to Wittgenstein and it helped me cope with a lot of questions that I felt after studying LW. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: I think we've all been in Werther's shoes. Though I hope that nobody comes to the same conclusion he came to. Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus,…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?” ↗For me, its The Sorrows of Young Werther. Published in 1779. It is a short read and quite beautifully written.
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite books or essays written at least 100 years ago?” ↗Germany is obsessed with Hamlet? Don't think so. Hamlet is presumably as often played as other classics like Goethe's Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther, and William Tell. That are the ones that are also read and learned in school. But I had never to read Shakespeare. This article has a very limited view and such tells a wrong story. Don't know what…
on “Why is Germany so obsessed with Hamlet?” ↗Hanlon's razor, or in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774): "...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent." The same box, in dimensions, was used…
on “Lying Microsoft Advertising” ↗…https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-dickens/david-copp... - Washington Irving collection: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/washington-irving/the-sket... - Father Goriot by Balzac: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/honore-de-balzac/father-go... - The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/j-w-von-goethe/the-sorrows... - Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fyodor-dostoevsky/crime-an... These are nearly always…
on “Harvard Classics Book Download” ↗Interesting fact about Goethe: as The Sorrows of Young Werther became widely popular it inspired surge in suicides among young men. Suicide became a fashion in those days. This is called The Werther Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide If you read…
on “Design for Living: What’s Great about Goethe?” ↗…out theirs. The specific application of this to suicide is sometimes called the Werther effect (after Goethe's character), after an alleged "wave" of suicides across Europe after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774. For a more modern take, according to Cialdini's book "Influence" (I have read the book but not chased down the refenced paper), Phillips, D.P.'s "Airplane Accidents, Murder and the Mass Media:…
on “MIT President on Aaron Swartz” ↗…together lots of these should give you something well-behaved, right? Not so fast. Those individual suicide-or-not random variables may be correlated (e.g., when Goethe published his gloomy book "The sorrows of young Werther", whose protagonist -- SPOILER WARNING -- kills himself at the end, a wave of copycat suicides swept across Europe). And they may depend on something that varies with time (the same example will do nicely,…
on “How the Idea of a ‘Normal’ Person Got Invented” ↗The original is Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther causing so many to emulate the titular character and commit suicide.
on “Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram” ↗…population. The suicides from the 1929 stock crash were fodder for much literature and the seems to show an increase up to 1929 and then a steep decrease. I know that during the 19th century, Goethe's "The Sorrows Of Young Werther"[1] was reputed to have provoked a rash of suicides. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther
on “Suicide Rates Among Adolescents and Young Adults in the United States, 2000-2017” ↗Related Trivia: The 8th largest conglomerate in South Korea, the "Lotte Group," is named after a character in Goethe's _The Sorrows of Young Werther_ [1] If you ever stay at the Lotte hotel in Seoul, instead of finding a Gideons Bible in your nightstand you will find a copy of Goethe's novel. There is also a museum in the lobby which explains the…
on “Many aspects of Goethe” ↗There is nothing new here, this phenomenon has existed for millennia. See Goethe’s ”The Sorrows of Young Werther”.
on “Why Are So Many Young Men Single and Sexless?” ↗Yes, there was a spike in suicides after Goethe published his first novel Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther). https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/04/22/the-werther-effect...
on “Has Social Media Fuelled a Teen-Suicide Crisis?” ↗…would be over if I read it. R. F. Kuang: Yellowface I can't wait for what R.F. Kuang's going to come up with next. This is an old classic -- my son recommended this to me. I enjoyed it. Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther What an amazing biography. Very very inspiring. Robin Marantz Henig: Monk in the Garden: Life of Gregor Mendel I had gotten her "Ember in the Ashes" in 2016 or so but never got to it - but this story…
on “Books I Loved Reading in 2024” ↗I just re-read "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by von Goethe. In the book, the protagonist commits suicide. It appears that now tech firms cannot even host very significant old books without age checks, which is absurd.
on “Tell HN: Online Safety Act to be enforced in the UK on July 25th” ↗