Reviews and News:
Puccini at a distance: Barton Swaim on watching the Met’s performance of Madama Butterfly in a movie theatre in South Carolina.
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Alan Jacobs on technology and attention.
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Alex Ross attends The Piatigorsky Festival in Los Angeles: “‘I wish I’d studied the cello’ was a common lament among the crowds at the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival, which drew a hundred cellists to Los Angeles in the middle of May. I said it myself, recalling tense childhood negotiations with the oboe. Outsiders like to think that the cello, the most uncannily human-sounding of instruments (it approximates a vocal range from low male to high female), would provide limitless companionship and consolation. We imagine ourselves playing Bach as dusk descends, savoring pensive joys and sweet sorrows. That the fantasy is unrealistic in the extreme—a regal contralto timbre arises only from a combination of freakish talent and thousands of hours of labor—hardly detracts from the vicarious pleasure of watching a master cellist give public shape to a private world.”
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Plato and love: “In Socrates’ great speech in the Symposium, he teaches us that love entails becoming better than we are, remolding ourselves so that we may be worthy of the absolute dimensions of reality. But this leads us to a confrontation with just that aspect of love we may have been most tempted to avoid: We may fail to live up to the image of ourselves that the one who loves us proposes. So may we also fail to account for the fullness of those dimensions, leaving behind the particular beauty of this peculiar person who loves us for what Socrates calls the ‘great sea’ of Beauty Itself.”
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In Case You Missed It:
James Stoddard’s Evenmore’s “Christian fantasy.”
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“Stalin’s effect on Soviet society was omnipresent and chilling.” David Mikics reviews Joshua Rubenstein’s The Last Days of Stalin.
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Since 1997 “a sort of asteroid has hit the safe world of Russian literature in English translation. A couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English. Surprisingly, these translations, far from being rejected by the critical establishment, have been embraced by it and have all but replaced Garnett, Maude, and other of the older translations. When you go to a bookstore to buy a work by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, or Chekhov, most of what you find is in translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky.” It’s a shame, argues Janet Malcolm.
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Da’wah is more dangerous than Jihad. Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains why in The New Criterion.
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Classic Essay: Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The Politics of Dissent”
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Interview: Jonathan Price talks with Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein about centralization and democracy.
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