Michael Johnson
The music industry has been charting the decline of classical market in the United States for at least a decade, attributing it to aging audiences, crashing CD sales and shrinking private subsidies. Music lovers beware: there are signs now of…
A series of violent street clashes across Russia in the past few weeks may be mere thunderclouds destined to dissipate, but one leading historian, Anatoly Bernshtein, wonders in print this week whether something more grim is happening to his country….
The old Soviet gulag system, the most extensive prison network in history, killed some 2.7 million people, most of them innocent of any charge other than loose talk. And yet this staggering human tragedy has rarely been tackled by commercial…
When I agreed to translate a management book from French into English a few years ago I thought it would be a breeze. I knew the languages and I knew the subject. But line by line, I learned that respecting…
If Americans hate the French so much, why do we try so hard to learn the secrets of their good life over there, why does the French “brand” — even when phony — sell so well, and why do we…
When I opened my Sunday New York Times to a story on Derek Jeter this week I was stumped from the first word. I had to ask my daughter to define OMG. “I use it all the time,” she said….
The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy By William Pfaff (Walker & Co., 240 pages, $25) It was hardly necessary, but William Pfaff warns us anyway that some of the unconventional thinking in his new book…
BOSTON — Visiting the United States this month after several years as an expatriate in France, I am fascinated to see this giant American bubble inside which live 310 million people, about half of them contented and half of them…
Voltaire, that ultimate freethinker and lifelong iconoclast, has never quite lost his audience. His epigrams are among the favorites of speechwriters and his political writings seem almost contemporary. Indeed he would make a suitable patron of today’s U.S. Libertarian Party…
