Reviews and News:
Fred Siegel on a new book about New York City politics in 1969: “Roughly 15 years ago, I took part in a symposium on the political legacy of former New York City mayor John Lindsay. Little of note was said from the podium, but I couldn’t help noticing that the former Lindsayites who spoke all had limousines waiting for them at the curb. It was a striking reminder of the epithets hurled at Lindsay during the 1969 mayoral election when his opponent, Mario Procaccino, mocked him as part of the ‘Manhattan arrangement’ and a ‘limousine liberal.'”
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Meir Soloveichick on Rembrandt’s Moses with the Ten Commandments, “one of the most authentically Jewish works of art ever created.”
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A new book purports to explain why so many people hate poetry.
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The author of The Thick of It – Britain’s hit TV series based on the comically inept inner workings of a British government – thinks it’s no longer possible to write political satire.
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Today is Bloomsday – a commemoration of the day portrayed in James Joyce’s great modernist novel Ulysses, June 13, 1923. And so, perverse as always, Elaine Showalter makes the case for a day commemorating a very different modernist masterpiece – and one celebrants might actually read: Mrs. Dalloway.
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Gary Bass on David Reiff’s new book about memory: “‘It was like the sound of rain, the sound of firebombs dropping,’ Keiko Utsumi remembers. She is an elderly, dignified Japanese woman, retired as a nurse and a midwife, impeccably dressed in a beige linen blazer in the sweltering Tokyo summer heat. Late in World War II, during the spring of 1945, she was 16 years old, put to work at a military factory in the port city of Yokohama, just south of Tokyo. During one of the United States’ incendiary bombing raids, she recalls huddling in a bomb shelter all night, terrified, watching the inferno of wooden houses all around. When she emerged into a scorched wasteland the next morning, with the ground so hot it melted her shoes, she saw the dead: ‘They were all black, all burned.’ Seventy years after the end of the war, Utsumi met me in central Tokyo last August to tell her story. Remarkably, she had never discussed her terrible experiences with anyone. ‘When I was leaving the house this morning,’ she said, ‘and told my son I’d be in an interview about the war, my son asked, You were in the war?’ ”
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Is the promotion of STEM really that essential to our survival? Rachel DiCarlo Currie isn’t so sure.
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Essay of the Day:
To no one’s surprise, Hamilton swept the Tony Awards last night. At the LA Review of Books, Laurie Winer explains how the musicals Oklahoma!, Hair, and Hamilton “can alter brain chemistry” and influence the nation’s politics.
“In the middle of my growing up, in the suburbs of Baltimore during the waning years of the Vietnam War, a musical called Hair happened. Hair was as much a national fetish as Oklahoma! was before it and as Hamilton is today. All three shows produced rabid fans and absurd ticket shortages, and for strikingly similar reasons. Oklahoma! opened on Wednesday, March 31, 1943; one week later it was sold out for the next four years. No one had ever seen anything like it.”
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Image of the Day: Racing on office chairs.
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Poem: Tennyson, “Break, Break Break”
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