Dr. Robert Zaller

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

Hello ChatGPT, Goodbye Education

Cheating is as old as the story of Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25). It’s also as old as the university. There’s certainly nothing new about ChatGPT, the new recipe for the oldest scam, except for [ 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 ]
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

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 ]
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 ]
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 ]

Obama: The Farewell Address You Won’t Hear

Politics

January 11, 2017 0

What comes with a new administration is an inaugural speech and a State of the Union address, in which, relieved of the baggage of campaign promises, the new president announces what his (or, someday, her) [ Read Article ]

Is Humanity a Lost Cause?

Politics

July 9, 2017 0

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

Edgar and Clyde: A Love Story

October 15, 2016 0

Clint Eastwood is nothing if not unpredictable. His latest film, J. Edgar, is an old-fashioned Hollywood biopic shot at a leisured pace—two hours and seventeen minutes—with polished production values and meticulous attention to period detail. [ Read Article ]

Politics

The Race to the Moon and the Fate of the Earth

August 1, 2019 0

Most anniversaries wear with time. Few, however have faded as quickly as the Apollo 11 moon landing half a century ago on July 20, 1969. More than half a billion people watched it on television [ Read Article ]

Politics

Going Crazy Over Terrorism

October 13, 2016 0

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 ]