Dr. Robert Zaller

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 ]
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 ]
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 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 ]
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 ]

Shafts of Light, Slants of Dark: Nancy Herman Paintings at the Cosmopolitan Club

Art

June 25, 2018 0

Nancy Clearwater Herman is perhaps best known for her large, richly complex quilts and hangings. The present exhibit at the Cosmopolitan Club shows another aspect of her art. The mostly small oil paintings on display [ Read Article ]

Weldon Kees and the Postwar World

Literary

October 25, 2017 0

Weldon Kees belongs to the circle of American authors who left us early, in some cases by their own hand: Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, David Foster [ 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 ]

Film

Blue Jasmine: Woody Does Tennessee Williams

October 15, 2016 0

Woody Allen, that hardy perennial, returns as predictably as Santa Claus, although, like Santa, he’s getting a bit up in years now. Like Santa, too, he sometimes has a present in his bag, but often [ Read Article ]

Politics

The Man Who Came to Dinner

September 29, 2020 0

A very funny play called The Man Who Came to Dinner had a two-year run on Broadway in 1939-40, enjoyed international success, and became an acclaimed movie. The plot concerned an overbearing media personality who’s [ Read Article ]