The Metropolitan Opera House in New York City has issued its first “trigger warning” for Puccini’s 1926 opera, Turandot, which takes place in ancient Peking, China. Here’s the full warning, written by Christopher Bronwer, the Met’s associate editor: We must also consider the…
Our staunch ally, Great Britain, first known as “the sceptered isle” in Shakespeare’s Richard II, now travails against many tempests — domestic political instability, regret over Brexit, a degraded military, culture wars, denigration of the former Empire, and some diminution…
It is hard to believe that it has been forty years since the release of Trading Places (1983), the comedy that asks the age-old question: Does heredity or environment determine our destiny? Trading Places tells the story of two blue-blood…
When Philip Roth died in 2018 at age 85, all eyes turned to Blake Bailey, his appointed biographer who’d been hard at work on a Roth biography already for several years. Roth fans such as myself looked forward to getting…
With the election of a self-declared “lesbian Marxist” to be its new president, the American Library Association (ALA) gave away the game. Now, only the naïve can think of the ALA’s upcoming “Banned Books Week” as a celebration of free…
Here’s how bad it has gotten. In a small Republican-leaning town, in a Trump +20 county, the local library board felt free to “disinvite” from speaking a mainstream conservative author with a dozen C-SPAN Book-TVs under his belt. That author…
George Santos, a newly elected congressman from Long Island, New York, has been caught in a string of embarrassing lies about his background. He claimed to have received a degree from Baruch College in 2010; he didn’t. He claimed to…
Do you remember back when you were in school and your math or science teacher gave a test in class in which you were asked to solve a problem or two and you were explicitly admonished to show your work?…
With Halloween came a new batch of articles, news segments, and podcasts lambasting and warning of unintended cultural appropriation. In an Oct. 14 PBS article, author Beatrice Alvarez admonished families that many costumes are “actually hurtful to many people because…
President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is going after conservatives in a way eerily reminiscent of the tactics employed when the state of Alabama went after the NAACP in the 1950s. In 1956, Alabama did not pass a law to…