Our military academies have curricula of a very high order, so why are we turning to widespread use of mercenaries? What’s the connection, you ask, between good teaching and mercenaries? History teaches us that mercenaries are used when there isn’t enough support for a war at home and when great powers become exhausted, corrupt and [...]
Read More...Parallels too closely drawn invite intellectual train wrecks, but it might not be too far a reach to connect yesterday’s Supreme Court decision overturning the District of Columbia’s strict handgun control law to our gunpoint involvement with Arab society.
Every Arab civilization since the advent of Islam in the 7th Christian century has been forced to [...]
Do you remember The Gates (inset) in Central Park in 2005, that hydrology of orange banners installed by Christos and Jeanne-Claude? I don’t think anybody mentioned it at the time but it had a precedent among the Arabs. They used to hold great poetry competitions in which the poems were painted on vast banners. [...]
Read More...(This is the latest transcript of Hot Copy my regular podcast for The Student Operated Press)
One of the reasons I cherish The New York Times is its institutional eye for the easy-to-overlook and profound. The March 27th front page features a story by Brian Stelter called Finding Political News Online, Young Viewers Pass [...]
Read More...(Note: I try to keep these weekly podcasts for The Student Operated Press conversational to make them easy listening for journalism students, so you’ll notice the language isn’t sanded and varnished.) [...]
Read More...This is the key to the figures in this famous painting, The Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull.
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The relatedness of things has always fascinated me, perhaps because where others collect objects I collect images. When my wife, Marilyn, and I lived in Arlington, Virginia, some of the recent immigrants who worked in our [...]