The notion of the zeitgeist has fallen into disrepute as too metaphysical, too German. No longer does the spirit of the time manifest itself in…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
When far from home in foreign cities, slowed by saddle sores or jet leg, menaced by security pat-downs or highwaymen’s pistols, the traveler is often beset by two contending impulses: avoid your own expatriate countrymen and women like the plague or seek them out as glue for your own identity fragmenting under the strains of the journey.
Must the virtuoso but virtuous? In The Republic Plato answered the question with an emphatic, uptight: yes. Most moderns by contrast are blithely willing to…
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s big win in the New York Primary this past Tuesday, the electoral map — in the color scheme adopted…
It took me sixteen hours door-to-door in automobile, plane and subway train to get from my house in the center of New York state to…
The creativity and craft of George Martin, the celebrated Beatles producer who died this week at the age of 90, is to be heard nowhere…
I first met the celebrated American composer Steven Stucky not in Ithaca, where we have both lived for the past twenty years, but in Los Angeles on February 26, 1995. I arrived in Ithaca later that year; Steve had taken up what proved to be a more than three-decade-long post as professor of music at Cornell back in 1980 after doing his doctorate in composition at the university in the 1970s.
When the Super Bowl turned fifty in Silicon Valley last Sunday the nation and the world yearned for a display of the latest developments cooked…
I’ve always loved the reading rooms of great libraries: the busy hush of research underway; the reluctance of old pages being turned; the furtive glances at the mysterious materials laid out on the desk alongside and at the person who’s ordered them; the fleeting eye contact made over the top of tomes
The challenge was announced six months ago in the heat of the hottest summer on record. A fearless few and a foolish many answered the…
Why, if a film is meant to be as historically accurate as possible, should its soundtrack be allowed—even encouraged—to be flagrantly out-of-sync with the times…