The pursuit of a legend by a clear-eyed lover (Camus, A Romance, Elizabeth Hawes, Grove Press, 2009, 319 pp) Albert Camus was 46 when he died in 1960. Elizabeth Hawes was 19. She was in love with him and had never met him. Or was it the idea of him? She would find out. And [...]
Read More...Historians marvel at the rapidity of: • Alexander the Great’s conquests • Islamic expansion • Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde • the rise of the United States as a world power • Nazi blitzkriegs But those phenomena proceeded at a snail’s pace compared to social networking in cyberspace. They were clunky and messy by comparison. And [...]
Read More...War cannot be left to filmmakers, historians and journalists. Their scope is too narrow, too shallow, however skilled they may be. War cannot be left to soldiers, politicians and preachers. Poets and artists must be called on to grasp all the dimensions of its horror and folly. For this reason, when you watch the 10-part [...]
Read More...Congress made itself irrelevant to public discourse by selling ideologies instead of examining ideas. Obscured in Barack Obama’s triumph is the triumph of digital communications: the people went around their leaders to engage in the discourse a servile, self-absorbed media establishment refused to host. The people went around their leaders just as their leaders have [...]
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