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 ]
Dimitris Lyacos’ long, tripartite poem, Poena Damni, is one of the most important and challenging literary works to come from Greece in the past generation, and it has achieved an international reputation. With the People [ Read Article ]
Why, asks the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Peter Dobrin, should anyone do La Traviata after Maria Callas? The simple answer is that great dramatic and vocal art demands to be done again and again in each generation, [ Read Article ]
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 ]
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 ]
Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters, describes Piero di Cosimo as a man who lived “in the strangeness of his mind,” beset by fears that were also compulsions—his pyrophobia was so intense, Vasari [ Read Article ]
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 ]
Sixty million people worldwide are now on the move. It is the largest migration since World War II. It reflects the reshaping of maps, particularly in the Middle East, and the populations of places that, [ Read Article ]
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 ]
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I got a phone call from my son. He told me to turn on the TV, and I saw the World Trade Center towers burning. Ash, some of [ Read Article ]
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