Recently added articles from New Criterion:
Art & ethics at Yale.(Notes & Comments)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> One of the chief lessons of contemporary "avant-garde" art, especially that which pullulates in an academic setting, is that the unutterably tedious can cohabit seamlessly with the repellent. That may seem counterintuitive. After all, wasn't the main point of ...
Libel tourism.(Notes & Comments)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> Last month, <Italic>The New Criterion</Italic> and the Washington-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies hosted a conference in New York on "Free Speech in an Age of Jihad." Many who have commented on the event characterized it as a conference about "libel ...
Introduction: what was a liberal education?(Essay)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> <Italic>The real difficulty in modern education lies in the fact that, despite all the fashionable talk about a new conservatism, even that minimum of conservation and the conserving attitude without which education is simply not possible is in our time ...
On the sadness of higher education.(Essay)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> The academic world that I first encountered was one of both intellectual beauty and profound flaws. I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s--in history and literature, above all--before the congeries that we term "the Sixties" began. Most of my professors were ...
The world we have lost: a parable on the academy.(Essay)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> More than a half century ago, Willmoore Kendall, an unrepentant cold warrior and one of this country's most brilliantly original political theorists, spoke at Harvard about disturbing trends in academic culture. To those preaching that a college campus should be an ...
The new learning that failed.(Viewpoint essay)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> Ten years ago John Heath and I wrote a lament for the decline of classical learning in the university--<Italic>Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom</Italic> . We sounded three simple themes. First, that the study of Western ...
Liberalism vs. humanism.(Essay)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> Writing forty years ago in <Italic>The New Industrial State</Italic> , John Kenneth Galbraith called on academics and intellectuals to seize the mantle of national leadership which at that time (he said) was in the hands of a bipartisan coalition of corporate managers, ...
The age of educational romanticism.(Essay)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools--its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise.Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in ...
The Old Story.(New poems)(Poem)
May 01, 2008; Logan, William ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> After the Blitz, her mother had begun an affair. So she said. No one would have called her wellbred, but she knew how to fill a low-cut dress, had a fetching smile and a tongue for success. He was a promising actor named Domenic, ...
The Fossil-Finder.(New poems)(Poem)
May 01, 2008; Sanders, David (American poet) ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Leaving the house far behind, while his friends, two lovers, quarreled, he studied the ground at his feet to find a proffered world. Where a stream had worn a limestone trough he washed off a rock he had unearthed, ...
Some Kind of Happiness.(New poems)(Poem)
May 01, 2008; Martin, Charles (American poet) ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> A windblown grain of happiness Has just now taken residence Between the moistened surfaces Of eye and lid: I blink and wince, Not recognizing it as such, And then I grimace to expel What I can feel but cannot touch, ...
The Other Osprey.(New poems)(Poem)
May 01, 2008; McQuade, Molly ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> She has a piercing high call without an end. Perched on the rough nest above the bay with a moment's ...
Friends & neighbors.(In the Heights)(Almost an Evening)(Theater review)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> <Bold>A</Bold> couple of weeks ago I went to see a low-budget, concert-style production of the 1960s musical <Italic>Half a Sixpence</Italic> at an off-Broadway revival house. <Italic>Half a Sixpence</Italic> was a crowd-pleaser that had successful runs both in ...
Courbet at the Met.(Art)(Gustave Courbet retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> The pale, wide-eyed young man tearing at his hair has been everywhere since the juicy Gustave Courbet retrospective opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the end of February. (1) He lunges at us, full lips parted, eyes staring in horror, enormous dark irises ringed ...
Filippo in Florence.(Art)("Filippo Napoletano alla Corte di Cosimo II de' Medici," Palazzo Pitti, Florence)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> The recent meltdown of Salander O'Reilly Galleries in New York provided many lessons for the audience in the art world and beyond. Some of the lessons were moral, others financial. Even psychiatry played a part. James Panero detailed most of them in his excellent article ...
Gallery chronicle.(Art)(exhibitions of John Dubrow, Wayne Thiebaud, Gregory Crewdson, and Lois Dodd)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> Art is work, of course, but just how should the work of art-making be done? Dada, pop art, and minimalism placed the premium on conception. The labor that went into the planning and reception of art went hand in hand with the relative effortlessness of execution. Artists ...
Concert note.(Alfred Brendel, piano, Carnegie Hall)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> Alfred Brendel, pianoCarnegie Hall, New York.February 20, 2008<Bold>A</Bold> renowned interpreter of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, the Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel played works by all three in what was billed as his last New ...
Smear tactics.(The media)(Essay)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> As I walked down the street near my home in suburban Virginia recently, I saw a decrepit Volvo sporting a bumper-sticker palimpsest. The barely legible original layer must have been as ancient as the vehicle itself, and by now there was no bumper space left, fore or aft, ...
With all due respect.(Great Victorian Lives)(Book review)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> The obituaries in the London <Italic>Times</Italic> have long been one of that paper's most notable features. This wasn't always the case. For the first sixty or so years of its existence, the <Italic>Times</Italic> 's obituary coverage was skimpy, and it was only ...
Communicators.(The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 13, A Vision, the Original 1925 Version)(Book review)
May 01, 2008 ... <Text rich="yes"> <Italic>Catherine E. Paul & Margaret Mills, editors</Italic> The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume XIII, A Vision; The Original 1925 Version. Scribner, 384 pages, $60Sometime in 1911--the exact date is not known--W. B. Yeats, visiting his friend ...