Letter from Paris: a Lump in the Throat

Yesterday’s Jazz Is entry, a Dexter Gordon film rendition of “Body and Soul,” put me in mind, for a reason you will soon understand that number always now does, of an another experience of the jazz standard. It was September 2001, and I was beginning a sabbatical year with a month-long drive around Europe. Julia […]

Why We Need Unions #351

I’m in activist mode this week. Later, next week, I’ll offer some deeper reflections. But a curious result of all the activist tweeting I’ve been doing through the week has been the response from conservatives. Mostly, my tweets are retweeted by the generally liberal like-minded. My tweets on the Wisconsin labor standoff, though, making their […]

Politics and Art

Vladimir Nabokov did not like the novel of ideas. Artists often have their idiosyncratic dislikes, contrary expressions of the unique aesthetic vision that drives their own work. Particularly, Nabokov did not like the work of those monuments of great-idea novels, Dostoyevsky and Mann, though there is no reason his distaste should have excluded the novels […]

How We Lived on It (34) – Pierre Gleizes and Greenpeace

Photographer Pierre Gleizes has worked for Greepeace for three of the four decades the environmental campaigning organization has been in existence. He has shot some of the organization’s most striking and well-known images. This year, Greenpeace turns forty. This video offers the photographer’s thoughts on his long career as journalist and activist. Follow Greenpeace Video […]