Essays

Louis Lewandowski may be the greatest German composer you’ve never heard of.  But hearing his setting of Psalm 150, just once, launched the career of America’s leading conductor of Jewish music.  And hearing his music, just once, launched a festival

I could decry the stores that open on Thanksgiving Day,

Or how, among the young, antisocial media holds sway,

Ferguson’s cry for justice that the system will not heed,

Peter Yarrow has every right to be disappointed with our war-torn world. 

At 76, however, he remains hopeful that things can improve and that he—and music—can still be the catalyst for change.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department of the US National Institutes of Health, and heads the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been acknowledged as the prime mover and advocate for Obamacare.

There is always a point, about 250 pages into writing a novel, where I want to set fire to it.

I have done that in the past. Twice. Thankfully, by now I’ve learned that the whole point of writing a first draft is to get it on the page so you can fix it.

When composer Morton Feldman first heard Atlas Eclipticalis by John Cage he described it as “the most thrilling experience of my life.” The comp

Why attempt to create art, I ask, to make something “other” when faced with the dilemmas of existence, with, as I’ve said in one of my own short stories, “all the ways that life betrays the living?”

Mother-Daughter Book Club fans, rejoice.  Heather Vogel Frederick, author of the erudite and beloved series of novels for and about girls who love to read, has reversed her decision to end matters after six volumes and will publish the seventh—and absolute

Imagine if you had all the time, money, and knowledge of art to fly around the world, visit museums, galleries, and churches in the company of the world’s top art critics, and then describe what makes great works of art—ones with which most people are not familiar—grea

Bob Dylan likes to use other people's words, and images. Some people object to this.

This is the introduction to the book on Amazon:

To the English-speaking world at least, the awarding of the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature to French author Patrick Modiano will probably have come as a surprise. Many won’t even have heard his name.

Holland might seem an unlikely place to go to see the art of a great American artist, but I am here to tell you it is worth the trip.

The Dutch furniture designer Martin Visser was the first collector to recognize the importance of the Cobra movement. Visser knew Karel Appel and his friends when they had just begun their careers, and were living in extreme poverty, with no recognition from the art world.

LeRoy Neiman’s paintings, posters and famed handlebar mustache made him one of the most recognizable artists of our time.