After love, money is perhaps the novel’s favorite subject, especially the novel in its most hopelessly (or, depending on your taste, endearingly) bourgeois form. Whether handled with Trollope’s irony or Fitzgerald’s romanticism, money in fiction challenges love’s delusion that our lives are defined by anything other than the hardest of practicalities, and that’s one reason … Read more
It has never been just about the music. The notion that performers should be faceless butlers of genius, impersonally conveying sublime messages in sound, has no basis in tradition. The bonkers antics of virtuoso pianists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prove otherwise. Franz Liszt, whose stage costumes ranged from Magyar military garb to … Read more
“Don’t mention the word ‘liberalism,’ ” the talk-show host says to the guy who’s written a book on it. “Liberalism,” he explains, might mean Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to his suspicious audience, alienating more people than it invites. Talk instead about “liberal democracy,” a more expansive term that includes John McCain and Ronald Reagan. When … Read more
In the summer of 1856, laborers at a limestone quarry near Düsseldorf were clearing mud and chert out of a cave when they turned up a fossilized skull. It was long and elliptical, with wide sinuses and a heavy ridge over the eye sockets. The workers thought it belonged to some kind of bear, but … Read more
