The longest nights of the year are here 🌙

A close-up of a snowflake against a dark background

Ease into the long winter nights.

With temperatures dropping and daylight decreasing, the Winter Solstice is officially upon us. The transition to shorter days and longer nights isn’t always easy, so we’ve compiled courses to help you warm up and defrost your mind. From learning about the path to happiness to listening to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, these topics are a perfect accompaniment to a winter evening spent at home.

Grab a blanket, sip a hot beverage, and cozy up with these Harvard Online courses:

The Path to Happiness: What Chinese Philosophy Teaches us about the Good Life

Today, finding happiness is about mindfulness and discovering your true self. You may have heard that happiness is found by looking within. Ancient Chinese philosophy challenges all of these modern assumptions. From Confucianism to Daoism, the philosophies developed over two thousand years ago are among the most powerful in human history.

This course brings voices from the past into modern contexts to explore the path to a good life today. The philosophical concepts discussed provide tools to change your life and increase personal happiness by focusing on your actions, the power of ritual, and the importance of sensing the world around you.

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Masterpieces of World Literature

No national literature has ever grown up in isolation from the cultures around it; from the earliest periods, great works of literature have probed the tensions, conflicts, and connections among neighboring cultures and often more distant regions as well.

Focusing particularly on works of literature that take the experience of the wider world as their theme, this course explores the varied artistic modes in which great writers have situated themselves in the world, helping us to understand the deep roots of today's intertwined global cultures.

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First Nights - Beethoven's 9th Symphony and the 19th Century Orchestra

No national literature has ever grown up in isolation from the cultures around it; from the earliest periods, great works of literature have probed the tensions, conflicts, and connections among neighboring cultures and often more distant regions as well.

Focusing particularly on works of literature that take the experience of the wider world as their theme, this course explores the varied artistic modes in which great writers have situated themselves in the world, helping us to understand the deep roots of today's intertwined global cultures.

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19th-Century Opera: Meyerbeer, Wagner, & Verdi

Travel through central Europe in the 1800s to experience the premieres of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, Wagner’s Das Rheingold, and Verdi’s Otello. A complement to our course on 18th-century opera, you’ll be introduced to opera through an in-depth study of these canonical works. You’ll learn about the musical details of each opera and the cultural influence of the works by understanding the circumstances of its composition, premiere performance, and its legacy and significance today.

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Shakespeare's Life and Work

How do we read Shakespeare? Do his plays belong to the past, or the present? To a famed dramatic genius or to readers and audiences around the globe? What do his plays really mean?

Moving between the world in which Shakespeare lived and the present day, this course will introduce different kinds of literary analysis that you can use when reading Shakespeare. With short videos filmed on location in England and readings covering topics like Shakespeare's contemporaries and the politics of modern performance, you will learn a range of critical tools that you can use to unlock the meaning and relevance of Shakespeare’s plays.