The other day, I heard an announcer on a local classical radio station gently chide his listeners, saying, “It’s almost Easter, and I haven’t had one request from our audience for selections from Handel’s Messiah!” For those who think of the Messiah as a Christmas tradition, this announcer’s request seems a bit odd. But historically
READ MORERussian political activist Garry Kasparov decried the West’s “complacency and retreat” from the fight against Islamic terrorism in the wake of the terrorist attack in Brussels. In a Facebook post published Tuesday, Kasparov, a grandmaster chess player and former world champion, began by hinting that the West would have to get serious in its fight
READ MOREThe routine is old. We’ve seen it before. A television host holds a mic in front of a passerby who willfully displays how clueless he or she is about general knowledge. It was funny when Leno was doing it 20 years ago. And I found Jimmy Kimmel’s recent “Lie Witness News” segment that aired last
READ MORERobert Conquest, a historian whose landmark studies of the Stalinist purges and the Ukraine famine of the 1930s documented the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet regime against its own citizens, has died at 98, having outlived the Soviet Union—which came into being in the year of his birth, 1917—and which he helped to bring down
READ MOREToday is Maundy Thursday of the Christian Holy Week in the West. Traditionally, the day remembers the Last Supper, Christ’s washing of the disciples’ feet, and the great mandate, which is where the name Maundy is derived. To begin, the name ‘Maundy’ is derived from the Latin word ‘mandatum’, which means ‘commandment’. From the
READ MOREWhile getting my oil changed the other day, I happened to catch a house-hunting reality program on the waiting room television. The house hunter in this case was a 25-year-old woman looking for a Manhattan apartment. While reviewing one option, she looked at the built-in bookcases which lined the wall, raised her eyebrows, and said,
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