The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, winding down its current season, has saved some of its best for last. The Ébène Quartet, beginning a year-long worldwide tour, plans to record all of Beethoven’s quartets in live [ Read Article ]
The major part of Nancy Herman’s small but select show at her gallery in Narberth covers a single long wall, but it says a great deal about looking, and the how and why of what [ Read Article ]
Andrei Tarkovsky, the exact contemporary of the French filmmaker Francois Truffaut (1932-1986), made only seven feature films in his thirty-year career, but their prestige has elevated him to almost mythical status. Ingmar Bergman called him [ Read Article ]
Robinson Jeffers came of age at the end of a century that had wrestled with the question of divinity as few others before it in the Western world. Christianity had twice divided, in the eleventh [ Read Article ]
People are talking these days about whether a two-state solution is possible between Israelis and Palestinians, as they do after each fresh outbreak of violence between them. But there is a pressing question closer to [ Read Article ]
America’s retreat from its century and a half commitment to public education has now become a rout. There has not been a greater betrayal of our country in my lifetime. There is no more disastrous [ Read Article ]
Thanksgiving this year included a sigh of relief that America had managed to hold a more or less normal midterm election in which the anticipated red tsunami did not materialize and voters apparently decided, Solomonically, [ Read Article ]
It’s clear that Donald Trump’s first hundred days haven’t turned out to be the walk in the park he envisioned. The most spectacularly unqualified and intellectually disabled leader ever freely chosen by any people on [ Read Article ]
What ever happened to George Bernard Shaw? Even past the middle of the last century, he was regarded by many as the most important English-language playwright since Shakespeare. Now, but for the occasional revival he [ Read Article ]
Most Americans agree we should never have invaded Afghanistan. Just about all Americans agree that we shouldn’t have attacked Iraq either, except for Dick Cheney and (presumably) the corporations that feasted on that country’s destruction. [ Read Article ]
This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee. King is now a national martyr, his birthday a public holiday and his statue, a towering figure that has [ Read Article ]
We’ve become accustomed to joke candidacies in recent presidential primaries, to voters embracing hitherto obscure personalities who in more mundane elections they wouldn’t trust for dog-catcher. Herman Cain, the pizza king, represented this phenomenon (thus [ Read Article ]
Cheating is as old as the story of Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25). It’s also as old as the university. There’s certainly nothing new about ChatGPT, the new recipe for the oldest scam, except for [ Read Article ]