Dr. Robert Zaller

Music

In Memoriam: Michael Tilson Thomas Conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra

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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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

What Does a Fair Trial Cost?

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 ]
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 ]

Calling in the Closer: Mahler’s Third Concludes the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Season

Music

June 12, 2017 0

It’s been a big year for Yannick Nézet-Séguin: negotiating a new contract to lead the Philadelphia Orchestra into the next decade while assuming the position of Music-Director Designate of New York’s Metropolitan Opera and conducting [ Read Article ]

Rock Bottom: A Torturer Now Heads the CIA

Politics

June 25, 2018 0

Weighing in on the subject of waterboarding, the notorious practice of simulated drowning widely practiced on suspected terrorists during the George W. Bush administration, our current president, Donald Trump, proclaimed that he not only approved [ Read Article ]

Film

Blue Jasmine: Woody Does Tennessee Williams

October 15, 2016 0

Woody Allen, that hardy perennial, returns as predictably as Santa Claus, although, like Santa, he’s getting a bit up in years now. Like Santa, too, he sometimes has a present in his bag, but often [ Read Article ]

Film

Winter Light: Ingmar Bergman at the Lightbox Center

October 4, 2018 0

2018 is the centennial year of Ingmar Bergman, Sweden’s most important cultural figure since Strindberg and arguably the one figure who has raised film to the level of the greatest art forms. There are festivals [ Read Article ]

Politics

How Long Must the Charade Go On?

June 30, 2017 0

Five months into the Trump presidency—or five hours, for that matter—it was clear that the White House had been occupied by a charlatan, somewhere between a buffoon and a demagogue and competent in neither role. [ Read Article ]