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Posts published by “David Yearsley”

How I Played Hooky from ‘High School Musical 3’

Recent reports that Zac Efron, who rose to stardom as the teenage heartthrob lead of Disney’s three High School Musical movies, is eager to do a to do a fourth film in the series sent…

The Well-Tempered Clavier at 300

Accessibility of knowledge was crucial to the Enlightenment. That ethos was embodied in the celebrated Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, the first of its seventeen volumes appearing in 1751, the year after Johann Sebastian Bach’s…

The New Errors of Downton Abbey

The crux dozen minutes of Robert Altman’s Gosford Park of 2001 unspool at the pace of parlor song. A real historical character—the matinee idol and songwriter, Ivor Novello, portrayed to elegant and resigned perfection by…

Scott Joplin Had Wall Street Down

A parallel survey of the historical soundtrack and stock market crashes reveals that musicians are not deaf to the beat of the financial markets…

Slippery Slope

Ithaca, New York — Snowflakes had been falling two weeks ago, but Wednesday brought blue skies and temperatures in the 80s to Upstate New York. Classes had just ended at Cornell University, and after two years…

Toots at 100

When I sat down this morning to write my column on my laptop, the day’s Google Doodle greeted me. There was a colorful tableau of jazz signs—piano keyboard, drumstick on cymbal, trumpet, clarinet— with Toots…

Cruel & Unusual Handel

On Wednesday South Carolina’s Supreme Court temporarily halted the execution by firing squad of Richard Moore, a 57-year-old Black man who has been on death row for two decades. The state’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster,…

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