Dr. Robert Zaller

Uncategorized

The Twilight of the European Union

The “West,” as that term has been understood since the end of World War II, is cracking up. It consisted, broadly, of the US, Canada, and Western Europe, the latter slowly recast as the European [ Read Article ]
Literary

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

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 ]
Art

Shafts of Light, Slants of Dark: Nancy Herman Paintings at the Cosmopolitan Club

Nancy Clearwater Herman is perhaps best known for her large, richly complex quilts and hangings. The present exhibit at the Cosmopolitan Club shows another aspect of her art. The mostly small oil paintings on display [ Read Article ]
Music

Love Above All: Opera Philadelphia’s La Traviata

Why, asks the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Peter Dobrin, should anyone do La Traviata after Maria Callas? The simple answer is that great dramatic and vocal art demands to be done again and again in each generation, [ Read Article ]
Politics

The Arkansas Death Circus

Arkansas: Isn’t that the place the Clintons came from? Yes, indeed. And some of us will remember that the Man From Hope, as Bill Clinton enjoyed being called, suspended his presidential primary campaign exactly twenty-five [ Read Article ]
Politics

How To Be a Citizen in the Age of Trump

“Hey, I’m President! I’m President! Can you believe it?!” That’s what Donald Trump said in celebrating the passage of the American Health Kill bill through the House of Representatives at a beer party on the [ Read Article ]
Politics

How It Happened: The Impossibility and Inevitability of Donald Trump

Maureen Dowd, The New York Times’ resident editorial wit, wrote recently that Donald Trump slipped into the presidency “through a tear in the space-continuum.” Sure feels that way. But would it were that simple. I [ 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 ]

How To Be a Citizen in the Age of Trump

Politics

May 9, 2017 0

“Hey, I’m President! I’m President! Can you believe it?!” That’s what Donald Trump said in celebrating the passage of the American Health Kill bill through the House of Representatives at a beer party on the [ Read Article ]

Politics

Hello, Tyranny: Life in the Age of Trump

February 13, 2017 0

The incessant flow of noise and static from the Trump White House—occupied territory on American soil—is designed, among other things, to conceal the fundamental new reality of our political situation: that we have an unelected [ Read Article ]

Politics

How Donald Trump Won—and Why Hillary Clinton Lost

November 14, 2016 0

How did he do it? The man who broke every rule in the political playbook, the man shunned, excoriated, and ridiculed every day by the mass media, the man rejected by the very party that, [ Read Article ]

Literary

Review: Robert Jay Lifton. The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival.

June 25, 2018 0

Robert Jay Lifton set out long ago to be our catastrophist: the chronicler of the grim age of the twentieth century that included the two most terrible wars in history, and, with the advent of [ Read Article ]