Fear and Corruption, Brazilian-style

With enormous potential, and once heralded as a new global superpower, Brazil proves time and time again to be a house of cards. Just as the country seems to find its way, something shakes, and the whole darned thing comes tumbling down.

My Mother, The Star

I now think about my mother every day. I did not do this before she came to St. Louis to live. There was, in fact, a stretch of years when I did not think about her much at all.

Bittersweet Symphonies

What happens when different musical genres and their associated connotations—as represented in musicians, styles of music, and surroundings—collide?

Chuck Berry’s Blues

There are at least two great mysteries about Chuck Berry. The first is why the father of rock ‘n’ roll became so cavalier and dismissive about his work once he achieved popularity. The second is how someone so deeply scarred as Berry could continue, at least for a period in the ’60s, to create music infused with so much joy, feeling, whimsy, and bristling intelligence.

Hamilton is Innovative, But Not Quite Revolutionary

The ways in which Lin-Manuel Miranda reverses traditional accounts of musical history by focusing on values taken from popular music, rather than values from art music, often contributes to critiques that view Hamilton as a problematic example of a progressive historical narrative.

The Two Cultures as One and Many

While Shaw assumed the burden of “the whole unwieldy load” of contemporary sociology, politics and economics, biology and medicine and journalism, Yeats turned away, convinced that science and politics were “somehow fatal to the poet’s vision.”