What has happened in this country?
The Pentagon has a secret court created by the Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA). The courtroom is in a windowless room on the top floor of the Department of Justice. There are seven rotating judges. The court meets in secret, with no published opinions or public records. No one, Read More
It’s been almost half a century since Ornette Coleman released his Atlantic records debut. On the cover, there’s a photo of Mr. Coleman hugging his plastic alto sax. Above that, printed in red letters: The Shape of Jazz to Come.
Before making that defiant statement, Mr. Coleman had already endured the extremes of derision Read More
There are artists who, despite their abundant gifts, seem destined to endure a melancholy fate, and one of them was Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938), the subject of a fine exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Bluemner was too “advanced” for the traditionalists at a time when modernism was still a contentious issue, and he Read More
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, by Anonymous. Metropolitan, 261 pages, $23.
It’s no surprise that the mass rape of German women by triumphant Red Army soldiers at the end of World War II doesn’t feature prominently in Moscow’s annual Victory Day parades. The Soviet Union overcame more obstacles than perhaps Read More
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, by Anonymous. Metropolitan, 261 pages, $23.
It’s no surprise that the mass rape of German women by triumphant Red Army soldiers at the end of World War II doesn’t feature prominently in Moscow’s annual Victory Day parades. The Soviet Union overcame more obstacles than perhaps Read More
There are artists whose lives become, in retrospect, an allegory of the era in which they worked, and one of them was Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898-1944), whose career is the subject of an unusual exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. Don’t be dismayed if her name is unfamiliar to you. It was certainly new to Read More
It is rare to encounter contemporary American paintings and drawings governed by a religious perspective, and rarer still for a contemporary artist to speak of “the divine” as a subject of new works of art. For most of us, anyway, serious religious painting is an aesthetic enterprise we associate with the distant past, if only Read More
Like something out of Woody Allen’s Sleeper , a high-tech yet oddly retro new contraceptive device has alighted onto bedside tables across the New York City area. Called Lady-Comp, this computerized update of the long-mistrusted rhythm method promises to emancipate women from the bloated, fluttering stomachs and diluted sex drives that have always accompanied birth-control Read More
German Expressionist painting, which is currently the subject of a thematic exhibition focused on Arcadia and Metropolis at the Neue Galerie in New York, has never been an art for the tender-hearted. It’s an art conceived in a spirit of raucous rebellion, and its ethos remained confrontational and its aesthetic abrasive even after the movement Read More
If you’re a fainter, you know the signs: heat beneath your skin, sweat above your lip, a dull beating in your ears. The world becomes smaller; a quiet, shadowy place beckons. Waking up is always ugly. Your friends’ alarmed faces zoom at you as if hitched to the ends of long camera lenses. They’re worried, Read More
