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Time Again to Support Academic Freedom
This morning, I received the following email from the Brooklyn College President, Karen Gould: Dear students, faculty, and staff, Each semester, student clubs, academic departments, and other groups on...
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Henry James on the ‘Fatal Cheapness’ of the Historical Novel
Reviewing Colm Tóibín‘s The Master, a ‘novelistic portrait’ of Henry James, Daniel Mendelsohn writes: ”The Master” is not, of course, a novel about just any man, but rather a novel about a figure from...
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Adam Gopnik on the Scientist’s Lack of ‘Heroic Morals’
In an essay reviewing some contemporary historical work on Galileo, (‘Moon Man: What Galileo saw‘, The New Yorker, February 11, 2013), Adam Gopnik, noting Galileo’s less-than-heroic quasi-recantation...
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Ten Years After: The Anti-War March of Feb 15, 2003
Exactly ten years ago, I gathered with hundreds of thousands of others, on a freezing cold day in New York City, to take part in an anti-war march. I was still hungover from a friend’s book party the...
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O. Henry on the South (Mainly Nashville)
I’ve only read a couple of short stories by O. Henry but have long owned an omnibus collection of them (presented to me on my twenty-eighth birthday). I’ve finally taken a gander at it, and stumbled on...
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Op-Eds and the Social Context of Science
A few years ago, I taught the third of four special interdisciplinary seminars that students of the CUNY Honors College are required to complete during the course of their degrees. The CHC3 seminar is...
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Mozart on Constanze: Tepid but Frank
In December 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote a letter to his father Leopold, telling him he wanted to marry Constanze Weber. He might have been a brilliant composer, but when it came to describing...
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The 1944 Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana Report
Today’s post continues a theme initiated yesterday: sensible views on drugs, expressed many, many years ago. Yesterday’s post referenced the New York Academy of Medicine’s 1955 report on opiate...
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Ten Years After: War Criminals Still Walk Free
You call someone a ‘mass-murdering war criminal’, you best not miss. And so, when I use that term to describe the unholy troika of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld–as I have in the...
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Marriage: It Ain’t a Religious Thing
Last year, I wrote a post on same-sex marriage, or rather, on Barack Obama’s evolving views on it. In that post, I handed out some unsolicited advice to the President, suggesting he view marriage in...
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Land, Ownership, Property, and Nationalism
A few days ago, a dinner-time conversation with some friends turned to the matter of property disputes within families. Both my wife and I spoke with some feeling about the fierce passions they evoked,...
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Samuel Chase and Judicial Supremacy
In the history of the US Supreme Court, Samuel Chase holds a singular, if dubious honor: he is, to date, the only Supreme Justice to be impeached (he was, however, ultimately acquitted by the US...
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Shrapnel is Still Deadly, No Matter Where It Strikes
Many years ago, while talking to my father and some of his air force mates, I stumbled into a conversation about munitions. There was talk of rockets, shells, casings, high-explosive rounds, tracer...
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Craig McGregor on Living in the Bush
This morning, as I rummaged through my bookshelves in one of those periodic, vain attempts I make to try and organize them, I came upon my copy of Australia Fair?: Recollections, Observations,...
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Murakami on Japan’s ‘Years of Trial’
Like most ‘Western’ students of the world wars, my reading has largely been confined to American and English sources; this is revelatory of both provincialism and laziness on my part. In the case of...
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I’ve Got Your Brooklynite Hayseed Right Here
George Plunkitt, of Tammany Hall fame, once said: [A] Brooklynite is a natural-born hayseed, and can never become a real New Yorker. He can’t be trained into it. Consolidation didn’t make him a New...
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Loss of Faith, the Jewish Atheist, and Working Class Rebellion in ‘Christ in...
In yesterday’s post on Pietro Di Donato‘s Christ in Concrete, I had noted how Annunziata and Paul’s session with the medium, the Cripple, could perhaps be viewed as an affirmation of the power of the...
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Father’s Day is Almost Over, Hurrah
I have never celebrated Father’s Day and to this day have not had occasion to, for this is my first Father’s Day. I moved to the US in 1987 and did not celebrate in it India; my father passed away in...
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‘Racial Weakening’ and the Decline of Ancient Rome
Muslim migration to Europe in recent times, and the resultant presence of large Muslim immigrant communities in several European countries, has often prompted much alarmist commentary ranging from...
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Reading ‘Roots’ in Sickbay
My reading of Alex Haley‘s Roots was feverish. Literally and figuratively, I suppose, for not only did I finish it in a little over two days, but I did so while running a body temperature above 98.4 F....
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