Dr. Robert Zaller

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 ]
Politics

Democracy Gets a Reprieve

The votes are still out in the 2022 midterm elections, partly a result of the patchquilt system of fifty states, each with its own rules of when and how to count them. Dear Georgia couldn’t [ Read Article ]
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

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 ]
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

A Strong Place: Robert Richenburg at the Findlay Gallery

The story of American Abstract Expressionism in its mid-twentieth century heyday seems a settled one, at least as far as its major figures are concerned: Rothko, Gorky, de Kooning, Newman, Still, Pollock, Guston, Kline, and [ 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 ]

Donald Doubles Down on His Base

Politics

July 14, 2020 0

So, what’s a fellow to do these days? Donald Trump was riding high a few months ago. He had what he liked to call a booming economy—booming, that is, for billionaires, with a stock market [ Read Article ]

How Donald Trump Won—and Why Hillary Clinton Lost

Politics

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 ]

Music

Of Sacred Spaces and the Right of Protest: The Orchestra’s Tour of Israel

June 25, 2018 0

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s just-concluded tour of Germany, Austria, and Israel has been the most controversial in its history. No, visiting Germany, where a resurgent right wing openly invokes the symbols of Nazism, wasn’t the problem. [ Read Article ]

Film

Chill the Classics, Woody

October 13, 2016 0

For some time, Woody Allen has been churning out a film a year. This year’s Irrational Man is his forty-seventh. For a long time, he has been mining the work of his betters, Bergman and [ Read Article ]

Music

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

June 12, 2017 0

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 ]