Founded in 1947, the third and youngest of Berlin’s great opera houses is the Komische Oper—the comic opera. In the rubble of war, it took up residence in the late-nineteenth-century Metropol-Theater, beloved for its racy…
Posts published in “Essays”
Noam Chomsky, who lives in Lexington, Mass. and teaches linguistics at MIT, spends almost every weekend on the road, giving talks on political themes. His classes are scheduled towards the end of the week, so…
In my more than seven decades of life I have traveled to places weird and unusual, but never did a view make me light-headed and dizzy, but the Steens Mountains East Rim Viewpoint did that…
Giacometti’s Last Ride: A Novelby Bart Schneider; Art by Chester Arnold;Kelly’s Cove Press; 2025; $20. Artists, Ezra Pound once observed, were “the antennae” of the human race and provided a “warning system” about the future.…
“This is it?” “Ain’t that whatcha asked for? A cheese sandwich? “Yeah, but I mean this?” “Y’expect some pimentos mixed in? It’s what it is. It’s like a bowl of Cheerios, y’know? You ask for…
I flew to Madrid on Iberia and then Royal Air Maroc down to Rabat, the capital of Morocco. Rabat is a regular looking city - easy and inexpensive - which I was eager to leave…
Opera thrives on competition as much as collaboration—on who can sing higher, louder, longer, more passionately; what production can seduce or scandalize most abundantly; which company can hoard the most prestige while staving off bankruptcy…
At a recent local party a woman from Oakland approached me to ask, “But what do seniors DO here? It’s so rural!“ The quick answer is that we socialize a lot. That answer doesn’t really…