Commentary

Arts Remembrance: The Passage of a Giant — Carla Bley, 1936 – 2023

October 18, 2023
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Carla Bley was an original. We will never see her like again. It is a great blessing that she left so much music.

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Book Review: “Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class”

October 17, 2023
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Dan Canon provides not only the statistics but powerful stories to demonstrate the extent to which plea bargaining has bankrupted the justice system

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Jazz Commentary: Three More Recent Composer-Driven Jazz Releases — Stretching the Boundaries of the “Conventional”

October 5, 2023
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These projects are more conventionally jazzish in their sounds than the four in the companion post, but that does not make their ambitions less worthwhile or less adventurous.

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Jazz Commentary: Four Recent Composer-Driven Jazz Releases — New Wine in New Bottles

October 4, 2023
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Four recent releases illustrate what can happen when the only limits are the imagination of the composer and the passion of the performers.

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Book Review: “American Purgatory” — Prison as a Form of Social Control

September 30, 2023
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“American Purgatory” is the sort of book reactionary politicians and organizations are trying to ban. It’s full of evidence that many of the attitudes and conditions prevalent in this country from its founding were racist, bigoted, even genocidal.

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Author Interview: Heather Cox Richardson on “Democracy Awakening”

September 22, 2023
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“The book in many ways is a defense of liberalism. It’s a defense of the idea that that’s really what the government should do in a democracy. The liberal consensus is what happens when you actually let people vote.”

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Arts Commentary: Chile’s 9/11 — the Undying and the Undead

September 19, 2023
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Two Chilean artists look at the death of democracy and the aftermath of the 1973 coup.

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Book Appreciation: Celebrating Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” –The Best Novel of the 21st Century

September 10, 2023
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In “Life After Life,” novelist Kate Atkinson has shown how boundless the imagination can be.

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Commentary: Brandeis University Axes the Arts

August 30, 2023
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Gutting a venerable department – particularly a world-renowned one that, by all accounts, delivers – in the name of belt-tightening is shortsighted and foolish.

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Film Commentary: The Heights and Depths, the Rise and Fall, of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”

August 27, 2023
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In the end, what strikes me most about “Vertigo” is its melancholy, its aura of grief, its mood of inevitable, irredeemable loss.

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