Essays
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Page 108
Beware Greeks bearing basketballs
Americans invented basketball, but the Greeks invented passion. At this year’s World Championship games, even diehard American fans found themselves cheering for the children of Sophocles against our own arrogant superstars. Oh, and guess who won?
Essays
6 minute read
The arts and 9/11
Have the arts failed us in our current crisis? The Inquirer’s critics seem to think so. But the long view of history suggests that the best responses to 9/11 are yet to come, and will amply justify the wait.
Essays
6 minute read
Rocky wins a prose knockout
The Rocky statue has fought its way to the base of the Art Museum. Does that mean the barbarians are at the gate? This much is certain: They aren’t grammarians.
Essays
2 minute read
Slide shows on the web
I have seen the future of museums, and it’s on the Internet. Here are some of the best examples of what I regard as the New Museology.
Essays
2 minute read
Waiting for cafe culture
Sidewalk cafés are springing up all over American cities like Philadelphia. But a café culture like Europe’s remains beyond our grasp. How and why are we Americans deficient? Let us count the ways.
Essays
7 minute read
The Inquirer's new owner and his opinions
Bruce Toll, the Inquirer's new chairman, says he'll exercise his owner's prerogative to express his opinions on the editorial page. But the critical question, which Toll ignores, is: Why would he want to undermine his property’s most valuable asset?
Essays
4 minute read
Who put the smirk in Smerconish?
A Philadelphia talk radio host’s selective judgment suggests that he has found his role model in the White House.
Essays
3 minute read
The new Inquirer demonstrates its independence
Now that the Inquirer is owned by Philadelphia’s establishment, how will it convince skeptics of its independence from Philadelphia’s establishment? Nine story ideas that should silence cynics once and for all.
Essays
4 minute read
Beyond 'The Da Vinci Code'
What’s worse than The DaVinci Code? The Christian overreaction to it. Only God knows what the earliest Christians believed as they painfully transformed their Jewish traditions into new faiths. There's enough untreated misery in the world without Opus Dei’s multiplying it in a misguided search for sainthood.
Essays
4 minute read
The Inquirer's new owners
The Inquirer and Daily News have been acquired by a syndicate of local business executives and civic boosters. Is this really cause for celebration, as the two newspapers and their new owners would have us believe? Does anyone recall the Inquirer’s disgrace under its last local civic booster owner, and its triumph under out-of-towners?
Essays
6 minute read