Author Archives: jsl915@aol.com

Throw out all the furniture, then have two dancer guys from New York City Ballet go all agile up and down the multi-levels. That’s what NYCB’s Emily Kikta does in her new short “W 73rd,” a collaboration with NYCB’s Peter … Continue reading →

Norman Solomon at commondreams translates for the President. Had he been leveling with the public, Obama would have admitted that: “In the name of defeating terrorist forces, our air war has the effect of recruiting for them. Meanwhile, in Syria, our obsession … Continue reading →

Robert Parry at Consortiumnews writes that the President “seems to want so desperately to be one of the elite inhabitants of Official Washington’s bubble that he keeps pushing narratives that he knows aren’t true, all the better to demonstrate that … Continue reading →

“I’m not even from this branch,” a librarian tells me. “Send some of it our way!” “It” is of course $. The line was long at the branch I was taking out books from, which is why that visiting librarian … Continue reading →

OK, I interviewed Estelle Winwood when she was ninety-nine, but Alex Ross interviewed now 101-year-old Norman Lloyd last May in Los Angeles and in the process “stepped back eight decades in time.”  On the New Yorker website, a companion piece … Continue reading →

Recently I’ve been watching 1966’s Our Man Flint, a 007-spoof in which the Bad Guys raise the world’s temperatures in order to create mayhem. And now, fifty years later, it’s happening for real!

My brother Nick, who was hosting, decided we had to eat outdoors the same way the Pilgrims did–rather global-warming weather,  so that didn’t prove onerous–and we would have a mock-trial, presided over by my cousin Merle, about whether Michael Dukakis’ … Continue reading →

On a Berlin street in September 1952, she’s lofted to kinetic (and literary??) immortality by a choreographic genius as a sister great-ballerina watches with enthusiasm. All this on the cover of University Press of New England’s spring 2016 catalog.

“Bombing Doesn’t Kill an Ideology It Feeds it” So reads a sign held up by a young man photographed at a demonstration in London last week. Taken by Alisdare Hickson/flickr/cc, it’s reproduced at CommonDreams. It’s encouraging that the other faces … Continue reading →

But that’s just me. Charles McNamara, Phd student in Classics at Columbia, is writing his thesis on the history of certainty in antiquity and its afterlife in Early Modern Italy. And he’s also co-editing a volume on ambiguity in Latin … Continue reading →