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Stephen Greenblatt
In April 2014 I received a letter from the University of Tehran, inviting me to deliver the keynote address to the first Iranian Shakespeare Congress. Instantly, I decided to go. I had dreamed of visiting Iran for a very long time.
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Kirill Gerstein
Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto is one of the most recognizable and popular pieces in the classical music repertoire. Yet the piano’s famous opening chords are not, in fact, what the composer wrote at all. The musical text has been distorted by interventions almost certainly introduced after his death.
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Alberto Manguel
In Verona and Arezzo, Padua and Ravenna, Dante sat at his borrowed table, filled with the vision that he wished to put into words and painfully aware that like the forest of the beginning of his voyage, “to say what it was is hard” because human language, unlike a dog, is an unfaithful creature.
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Elizabeth Drew
Ever since Hurricane Bibi blew through Washington last week, advocates and opponents of a possible nuclear agreement with Iran have been assessing the damage. It’s clear that the traditional bipartisan approach toward Israel has been smashed.
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Robert Storr
Guston was never an autobiographical painter per se, nor was he a “history painter” in the traditional sense of that term. Yet his work breathes—and sometimes gasps or wheezes—lived experience.
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James Gleick
Increasing numbers of Twitterers don’t even pretend to be human. Or worse, do pretend, when they are actually bots—very, very tiny, skeletal, incapable robots, little more than a few crude lines of computer code. The scary thing is how easily we can be fooled.
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