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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
As I write this, the results of the Super Tuesday primary votes and caucuses have not yet come in, but the result is foregone: the media that anointed Hillary Rodham Clinton the Democratic nominee and [ Read Article ]
Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw American soldiers from Afghanistan before September 11 is not, of course, an end to the war in Afghanistan itself, a forty-year conflict that began with the Soviet occupation of the [ Read Article ]
Long-lived chamber ensembles are like fine wines: the vintage keeps coming back, sometimes with the flavor slightly altered, but the bottles occasionally need changing. The Juilliard Quartet is seventy years old, and its cellist of [ Read Article ]
The Curtis Symphony Orchestra concluded its 2018-19 season by doing something it had never done before, namely, Anton Bruckner. There isn’t any easy Bruckner, but the Curtis essayed his last and arguably most difficult work: [ Read Article ]
Andrew Sullivan, writing in the current issue of New York Magazine, calls the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency “an extinction-level event,” the life-form under threat being American democracy. That’s a pretty severe threat level [ Read Article ]
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 ]