Category: Culture
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A 50-year civil war?
Jill Lepore argues in The New Yorker that the Kent State shootings, of which today is the 50-year anniversary, followed by those at Jackson State in Mississippi, followed by the “Hard Hat Riot” in New York (in which construction workers beat up student antiwar protesters) began a civil war that continues today, with Trump’s shock…
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The Information Problem
A friend who works as a public-health researcher was complaining the other day that the various guidelines being issued by state and federal agencies, supposed to tell us all how to behave during the coronavirus pandemic, seemed vague and general. Yes, we grasp the concept of social distancing, means, and the meaning of “stay home”…
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Brassed Off
I’ve been a Jules Feiffer fan for as long as I can remember. To my 1960s teenage mind, his cartoons and animations put him squarely in that olympian world of hip, intellectual Greenwich Village. He was in a pantheon that included comics like Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May, and publications like the…
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Empathy Check
Josef Stalin is supposed to have said, “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic.” You can decide where 97,000 — roughly the number of deaths from COVID-19 that have been recorded thus far — falls on that spectrum, but it seems clear that we have entered a zone in which the…
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Vilna, Vilna
Before leaving Vilnius, some random thoughts and images. We were invited the other day to the final match of a basketball tournament featuring the Maccabi Tel Aviv junior team and a local sports academy. It was a spirited contest, with some surprising 3-point shooting by both teams, but Maccabi ran away with it in the final…
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Frank Zappa
On a quiet Vilnius corner, not far from the old city center, a statue of Frank Zappa has stood since 1995. Why? This is a popular question.
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