On the last Sunday of this past October, a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest broke out in Washington Square Park in New York City. Dozens of participants and thousands of onlookers thronged to the event and…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols fills King’s College Chapel at Cambridge University every year on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. The service is broadcast by the BBC and heard, according to some estimates,…
Released only the day before the election, will.i.am’s sonic squib, “Yes She Can,” was the final political misfire of the musical campaign, the cannon’s weak report barely heard as evening fell on Kamala Harris’s presidential…
The first half of the German seventeenth century was a time and place of short men with well-tended facial hair. The prevailing style dictated long, groomed mustaches and goatees tucked against starched ruffs that rode…
It is hard now to think back beyond Tuesday night. But I do remember that when I heard “Yes She Can” on Monday afternoon, released that day by the ardent Democrat, will.i.am, I felt that…
Twice a year, every spring and fall, Ithaca, New York hosts one of the biggest used book sales in the United States. Staffed by a legion of volunteers who work for months accepting and organizing…
The iconoclastic American composer become cultural monument Charles Ives was born 150 years ago last Sunday. Ulysses S. Grant was then in the midst of his second term as president. Ives’s father George, the formative…
“To faint was a fault past hope of pardon,” wrote the Duke of Saint-Simon in his Memoirs of Louis XIV, an insider’s account of battlefield debacles, antechamber intrigues and bedroom assignations during the reign of…
The season has changed, if reluctantly. Time to put the storm windows on the old clapbord house, tune the grand piano and take out a volume of 18th-century duets off the nearby music shelf. And…