Getting used to Fall

A beautiful piece on the new season by Gina Dostler – Autumn Alignment: I feel the coolness gently touch my face as it drifts through the window screen, and I know summer is coming to its end. And though Indian summer hides in wait for its call to jump out and play its games with hot …

Forget critic reviews – enjoy the beautifully written narrations of AllMusic, AllMovies, & AllGames

One of the joys a Pandora listener experiences is hearing a song for the first time. That moment when the music genome offers up his ideal genetic match from an artist he’s never heard before. And when he clicks the bio to learn more, the AllMusic database loads up a charming piece of prose: Undeniably …

Amazon restarts the serial novel genre – with Charles Dickens and a Yoga murder mystery

I love that Amazon is rekindling the newspaper subscription through the e-reader. It invokes an image of reading the newspaper in the morning, with my coffee and family at the table. But replace the newspaper with a Kindle and does it still work? If you’re a digital geek of course. And the beauty of online …

A Labor Day Question: Will You Be Living Your Passion At 80 Years?

This weekend, I experienced the mellifluous genius of John Williams conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl through a series of scores he has composed over his fifty-plus year career. The man responsible for creating the iconic themes to Star Wars, Superman, Indiana Jones, E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter (the list …

Ai WeiWei reviews London’s opening ceremony for 2012 Olympics – criticizes Beijing’s

Brilliant. It was very, very well done. This was about Great Britain; it didn’t pretend it was trying to have global appeal. Because Great Britain has self-confidence, it doesn’t need a monumental Olympics. But for China that was the only imaginable kind of international event. Beijing’s Olympics were very grand – they were trying to throw a party …

Grading Obama’s love letters: women swoon, men see through them

What kind of grade would he (Barack Obama) have gotten for such T.S. Eliot analysis…a reading that was admittedly done without perusing the footnotes? We checked in with some current members of the Columbia English department. Matthew Hart, who specializes in 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone culture with an emphasis on modernist poetry, was not terribly blown away, as …