Dr. Robert Zaller

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 ]
Music

Early and Late Beethoven, with Fauré

The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, winding down its current season, has saved some of its best for last. The Ébène Quartet, beginning a year-long worldwide tour, plans to record all of Beethoven’s quartets in live [ 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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]

War, Anyone? The Commander-in-Chief Wants To Pick a Card

Politics

June 12, 2017 0

It’s clear that Donald Trump’s first hundred days haven’t turned out to be the walk in the park he envisioned. The most spectacularly unqualified and intellectually disabled leader ever freely chosen by any people on [ Read Article ]

Democracy and the Sixth Great Extinction

Politics

May 22, 2019 0

Is the fate of the planet—that is, of our fate on it—tied to the fate of democracy? I think there are grounds for suggesting it. You could make a negative case for the proposition. Democracy, [ Read Article ]

Politics

Is Donald Trump an “Extinction-Level Event”?

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

Ben Carson and the Crumbling of American Democracy

October 13, 2016 0

We’ve become accustomed to joke candidacies in recent presidential primaries, to voters embracing hitherto obscure personalities who in more mundane elections they wouldn’t trust for dog-catcher. Herman Cain, the pizza king, represented this phenomenon (thus [ 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 ]