Back in the heyday of Martin Luther King, Jr., the stated goal of the civil rights movement was to strengthen the harmony of American society by persuading the nation’s less enlightened white citizens to transcend their preoccupation with skin color….

Charles Fourier, the communist ancestor of Karl Marx dismissed as a “utopian” by Marx because geniuses do not allow for antecedents, declared his sexual orientation “sapphianism,” which he defined as a male lover of lesbians. As a sort of unintentional…

Years ago, I read a novel that impressed me deeply. But I couldn’t recommend it to anyone because it was in Norwegian, the English translation long out of print. I’m happy to report that you can now get the English…

Recently I dropped my cell phone somewhere between our home and the supermarket across the street. When I opened our front door with the intention of going out and looking for it, I saw that somebody had found it and…

Five hours, baby. Of course, by Netflix standards, it’s the flicker of an eyelid, the flap of a hummingbird’s wing, the life expectancy of a sandwich in the vicinity of Jerry Nadler. But given that the five hours in question,…

This commentary (I won’t call it a review) requires this preliminary disclaimer: I have a business connection with the Norwegian miniseries, The Lørenskog Disappearance, now streaming on Netflix. I supplement my retirement by translating Norwegian movie and TV production scripts,…

Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state of the United Kingdom and 14 other sovereign nations, but not for long. I’m not referring to her mortality, an attribute that she shares with all of us except for Cher and…

Last Saturday evening, thanks to a spontaneous bout of channel surfing, I found myself watching, on NRK, Norway’s public-broadcasting network, the opening minutes of something I never even knew existed: the Eurovision Young Musicians competition.   Eurovision Young Musicians is not…