Dr. Robert Zaller

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 ]
Politics

How Has Donald Trump Affected Your Writing and Life?

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 ]
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 ]
Music

From Vienna to Budapest: The Marlboro Musicians Perform

Musicians from Marlboro paid their third visit to the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society at the Society’s penultimate concert of its 2018-19 season at the Perelman Theater. The Chamber Music Society itself was born, thirty-three years [ Read Article ]
Music

To Fugue Or Not To Fugue: PCMS Presents the Juilliard Quartet

Long-lived chamber ensembles are like fine wines: the vintage keeps coming back, sometimes with the flavor slightly altered, but the bottles occasionally need changing. The Juilliard Quartet is seventy years old, and its cellist of [ Read Article ]
Politics

Pay To Play: America in the Middle East Today

Modern American foreign policy in the Middle East was formed by three pivotal events: the determination to control the region’s oil resources through public policy and oil corporations after World War I; the decision by [ Read Article ]

Obama: The Farewell Address You Won’t Hear

Politics

January 11, 2017 0

What comes with a new administration is an inaugural speech and a State of the Union address, in which, relieved of the baggage of campaign promises, the new president announces what his (or, someday, her) [ Read Article ]

Is Donald Trump an “Extinction-Level Event”?

Politics

October 11, 2016 0

Andrew Sullivan, writing in the current issue of New York Magazine, calls the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency “an extinction-level event,” the life-form under threat being American democracy. That’s a pretty severe threat level [ Read Article ]

Politics

The Fire This Time: Race Explodes at Last on Obama’s Watch

October 13, 2016 0

After Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, after the killings of unarmed and unresisting African Americans—one a child of twelve—in New York, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Charleston, the murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore on April [ Read Article ]

Politics

What Should We Do About an “Election from Hell”?

October 11, 2016 0

Recently, I received an invitation to participate in a discussion about the election this week at Drexel. The objective was to consider the candidates and the issues, and to urge Drexel students to vote. I [ 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 ]