Dr. Robert Zaller

Academics

Outsourcing the Future: How America Has Abandoned Its Commitment to Public Education

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 ]
Politics

Hello ChatGPT, Goodbye Education

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 ]
Academics

When a University Loses Its Soul

More than six decades ago, the sociologist C. Wright Mills warned of a “new universe of management and manipulation” that had entered American life, and that threatened to fundamentally alter its character and undermine its [ Read Article ]
Film

You Can’t Go Home Again: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia at International House

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 ]
Politics

Is a Two-Party Solution Possible in the U.S.?

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 ]
Robinson Jeffers

Misotheism in Robinson Jeffers’ Construction of Divinity

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 ]
Music

Early and Late Beethoven, with Fauré

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 ]

“An Idiot, an Imbecile, and a Pickpocket”: Francis Picabia at the Museum of Modern Art

Art

January 11, 2017 0

Francis Picabia (1879-1953), born in Paris to a French mother and a Cuban father, was an exact contemporary of Pablo Picasso and a close one of Braque and Léger. His painterly skill and pictorial imagination [ Read Article ]

Our Broken Polity, and How To Fix It

Politics

November 1, 2016 1

As we stagger toward the finish line of one of the most dismaying election campaigns in American political history, one thing is clear: that our political system as it now stands is broken. We reached [ Read Article ]

Politics

What Should the Left Do in the Trump Era?

January 24, 2017 0

Get over it, Joe Biden was advising us the other day. It’s happened, it’s done. Well, yes. Donald Trump is our 45th president, and our cross to bear. And, okay, what next? A lot of [ Read Article ]

Politics

Who I Voted For, and Why

November 10, 2016 0

I haven’t yet cast my ballots in this year’s election, but I will, and here’s who I’ll have voted for: For president, I will choose Bill McKibben, environmental activist and organizer of the climate change [ Read Article ]

Greece

Endgame for the Grexit, or More of the Same?

October 15, 2016 0

As I write, just past the unmet deadline for the Greek payment of a scheduled 1.55 billion-euro debt service, it is impossible to say what the next week or month will bring. The past week, [ Read Article ]