Dr. Robert Zaller

Politics

After the Brexit: What Next for Greece?

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

Free Speech, Propaganda, and the Right To Be Heard

Free speech is the most important right we have. The Founding Fathers, understanding it as the prime element in a free society, wrote it into several amendments of the Constitution. The First Amendment guarantees it [ Read Article ]
Music

Heroism, Romantic Style: The Curtis Orchestra Plays Brahms and Strauss

The idea of the hero goes back in Western literature to Homer’s Achilles, and, in mythology, to Samson and Hercules. Alexander the Great fit the mold as a conqueror, and so did Napoleon, the original [ Read Article ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

Politics

Why Inequality Matters

October 13, 2016 0

It’s official (if you ever doubted it): America is a plutocracy, which means, in Lewis Lapham’s paraphrase of Lincoln, government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. Everything about the country bespeaks [ Read Article ]

Greece

Endgame for the Grexit, or More of the Same?

October 15, 2016 0

As I write, just past the unmet deadline for the Greek payment of a scheduled 1.55 billion-euro debt service, it is impossible to say what the next week or month will bring. The past week, [ Read Article ]

Politics

Is Humanity a Lost Cause?

July 9, 2017 0

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 ]