Dr. Robert Zaller

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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
Robinson Jeffers

Misotheism in Robinson Jeffers’ Construction of Divinity

Robinson Jeffers came of age at the end of a century that had wrestled with the question of divinity as few others before it in the Western world. Christianity had twice divided, in the eleventh [ 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 ]
Art

Nancy Herman: Totems

The major part of Nancy Herman’s small but select show at her gallery in Narberth covers a single long wall, but it says a great deal about looking, and the how and why of what [ Read Article ]

Mrs. Warren’s Profession at the Lantern Theater

Theater

October 11, 2016 0

What ever happened to George Bernard Shaw? Even past the middle of the last century, he was regarded by many as the most important English-language playwright since Shakespeare. Now, but for the occasional revival he [ Read Article ]

How Long Must the Charade Go On?

Politics

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 ]

Politics

The Heresy of Free Speech

December 11, 2017 0

The Constitution guarantees the right of free speech. That’s only the beginning of the story. People and institutions try to shut us up all the time, or make us pay a price with our pocketbooks, [ Read Article ]

Politics

Rock Bottom: A Torturer Now Heads the CIA

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 ]

Greece

The Fourth Great Crisis: Greece in the Summer of 2016

October 11, 2016 0

From Omonia Square, three main streets lead to the center of Athens in Syntagma: Stadiou, Panepistemiou, and Akademias. They have been for many decades the commercial heart of the city. Walking up Stadiou this summer, [ Read Article ]