Dr. Robert Zaller

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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
Art

Nancy Herman: Totems

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 ]
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 ]

Not Another Day in Afghanistan or Iraq

Politics

October 13, 2016 0

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 ]

After the Brexit: What Next for Greece?

Politics

October 11, 2016 0

After World War II, it was often the fashion to talk of something called “world government” that would necessarily replace the disjointed global system of nation-states and nationally-based empires which had led to two great [ Read Article ]

Politics

Going Crazy Over Terrorism

October 13, 2016 0

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I got a phone call from my son. He told me to turn on the TV, and I saw the World Trade Center towers burning. Ash, some of [ Read Article ]

Politics

Farewell, Empire: How the American Century Ends

December 12, 2017 1

Donald Trump returned recently from his twelve-day Asian trip, delighted to have been generally wined, dined, and humored, while the Chinese were gleefully stepping up—without his apparent notice—to eat America’s lunch. It was yet another [ Read Article ]

Politics

Where American Democracy Is Now

December 5, 2022 0

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 ]