Admin | December 30, 2011
UI Theater Department stages modern Hamlet BY JULIA JESSEN | DECEMBER 01, 2011 7:20 AM The University of Iowa Theatre Departments production of A Hamlet will surprise Shakespeare lovers who are more familiar with Hamlet clad in tights and clutching a skull. Its kind of a contemporary Hamlet, said Lauren Brickman, who plays Gertrude in [...]
Admin | December 30, 2011
Last Tuesday, I became an instant fan of Adam Frank — an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester — after hearing his commentary on NPR. (That is he to your right) Titled “Pepper-Spraying The Holidays: Time And The Ethic Of Consumption,” it begins by reminding us — my words — how sick we are to [...]
Admin | December 29, 2011
A humorous theory called Godwins Law suggests that the longer an online discussion continues, the greater the probability that someone will invoke a comparison that involves Hitler or the Nazis. The observation expresses a truth that in modern culture in the almost 70 years since World War II, analogies based on Hitlers regime have become [...]
Admin | December 27, 2011
The novel discovery made over the course of these installments is that the archetype identifying the proper role of gay people in history smashes modern cultures straight-jacketed, commonly-accepted dualism of Apollonian (law abiding) versus Dionysian (law breaking) with a third way. The third way is Promethean, the notion of those with heightened empathy and compassion [...]
Admin | December 25, 2011
The stories behind simple Christmas symbols are anything but. Consider the candy cane. Its red and white stripes might signify the sacrifice and purity of Jesus, or theyre a 19th-century candy-makers twist intended to dazzle his grandchildren. Both stories are alive and well on the Internet. Is Santa Claus the imagined incarnation of a fourth-century [...]
Admin | December 24, 2011
Notting Hill Editions Editor Lucasta Miller considers why the time is right for the re-emergence of the essay (www.nottinghilleditions.com, @NottingHillEds) Intriguingly, it seems that the essay may tend to flower at moments of growth-spurts in the cultural history of the dissemination of the written word. As the growing influence of print separated authors even more [...]
Admin | December 21, 2011
If you go What: Marco Island Jewish Film Festival Where: 991 Winterberry Drive When: All films are shown at 2 pm n 100 Voices: A Journey Home Dec. 18 n The Yankles Jan. 18, n Berlin 36 Feb. 12 n La Rafle Feb. 26 and Shole, Aleichem — Laughing in the Darkness March 4. Cost: [...]
Admin | December 17, 2011
Eurozone crisis will never be resolved until Berlin faces up to the fact it and its export surplus are the cause of the problem I AM a Germanophile. Germany is the cradle of modern science รข?? of Einstein, Heisenberg and Planck. It gave us the literature of Goethe and Schiller, Mann and Grass. The mind-stretching [...]
Admin | December 10, 2011
One of the most refreshing changes in the new translation of the Mass is the translation of perturbatio as ?distress? instead of anxiety. This new phrasing brought back a very good memory for me of a professor I had in seminary, a most interesting man with an interesting history. His name was Nicholas Sprinc. He [...]
Admin | December 4, 2011
They called it The War to End All Wars. No misnomer could be more ironic – or more tragic. The First World War, far from ending conflict, ushered in the bloody 20th century. It was the crucible and the cataclysm that launched the Russian Revolution, toppled the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires and led, inexorably, to [...]