The works shown in New York City Ballet’s annual Fall Fashion Gala typically, and perhaps unsurprisingly, elevate style (of ...

Suzanna Murawski on Rousseau, Rothko & American literature.

What’s so bad about having a mentally deficient ruler? Surely the ruler’s advisors can make wise decisions and tell him what to say? When I hear such reasoning, I think of Tsar Nicholas II, his sad ...

Everyone knows about Aesop and his fables, but few have ever read straight through any serious collection of them, never mind Ben Edwin Perry’s unsurpassed Aesopica of 1952, which assembles 725, along ...

On Herald of a Restless World by Emily Herring. To help answer we are guided by a fine new book, Emily Herring’s Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People. 1 There ...

We have known composers who conduct, but conduct mainly their own music: Stravinsky, for example, or Copland. We have known composers who are also big-league conductors: Bernstein, Previn, Boulez.

An obolus is a small silver coin the Greeks placed under the tongues of the dead so they could pay Charon as he ferried them across the river Styx to the underworld. Andrew Rickard named his ...

In 2003, when results came in for the 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (sppa), Dana Gioia took action. The survey was designed by the National Endowment for the Arts, where Gioia served ...

The MS-13 gang member who cuts my hair knows all the best used-book shops in Mexico City. His most recent recommendation was a cavernous, two-floor store just down the street from the Coyoacán borough ...

“Depend upon it, sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” I suppose that in logic his mind ought to continue to concentrate ...

While William Faulkner remains the leading figure in the flowering of Southern literature from the middle of the last century, more than a few others are well worth any reader’s attention: Robert Penn ...

On The Light of Battle by Michel Paradis. As a young man Eisenhower seemed to be searching for a father figure to compensate for his own father’s life of failure. His patrons included not only ...