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 ]
banner
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 ]
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 ]
Politics
Where American Democracy Is Now
Thanksgiving this year included a sigh of relief that America had managed to hold a more or less normal midterm election in which the anticipated red tsunami did not materialize and voters apparently decided, Solomonically, [ 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 ]
Politics
Democracy and the Sixth Great Extinction
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]