Dr. Robert Zaller

Politics

Where American Democracy Is Now

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 ]
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 Humanity a Lost Cause?

Sometimes it takes a deeply conservative intelligence to get to the heart of the matter. Such an intelligence was that of William Butler Yeats, who wrote nearly a century ago that things, not men, were [ 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 ]
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

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 ]

Misotheism in Robinson Jeffers’ Construction of Divinity

Robinson Jeffers

August 16, 2023 0

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 ]

In Memoriam: Michael Tilson Thomas Conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra

Music

March 13, 2017 0

Memory and mourning was the theme of Michael Tilson Thomas’ concerts this weekend with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The long-time conductor of the San Francisco Orchestra has had a continuing relationship with the Orchestra, and his [ Read Article ]

Politics

How Has Donald Trump Affected Your Writing and Life?

June 25, 2018 0

I have been writing occasional opinion pieces about Donald Trump since his presidential run began three years ago. Like most commentators, I assumed it to be a vanity candidacy, and saw it as part of [ Read Article ]

Literary

Towards the Post-Modern Novel: The Polyphonic Consciousness of György Sebestyén

October 11, 2016 0

The defining works of the Modernist novel, Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, all worked to dethrone the presuppositions of bourgeois consciousness, with its assumption of fixed [ Read Article ]

Politics

What Does a Fair Trial Cost?

May 22, 2019 0

What do Bill Cosby, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Leslie Moonves, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, James Levine, Charles Dutoit, Peter Martins, John Conyers, and Al Franken have in common? They are all prominent males [ Read Article ]