Essays

Russian President Vladimir Putin has a secret fascination with Leo Tolstoy.

Enough press attention has been given to the "religious freedom" laws in Indiana and Arkansas that there was initially little incentive to write more. That is, until conservatives reacted to opposition to the laws with an excess that is astonishing even for Fox News.

A Tale of Two Cities

Three decades and five thousand miles separate two photographs.

Pope Francis is poised, within the next two or three months, to announce one of the signature documents of his papacy, an encyclical on climate change. And we can hope and pray that it will be "world-changing" in the very best sense of that expression.

In my never-ending quest to become hip, cool and trendy -- and of course to feel younger and assuage the ravages of time -- I have subwayed to distant Williamsburg to eat at the latest bohemian restaurant, I have taxied to the Lower East Side to hear contemporary 

As the Middle East descends ever further into chaos, Rome suddenly finds itself in the crosshairs of Islamic State (IS).

"Even siblings we don't see, who live differently from us, who move in their own world, may be shoring up our lives, our sense of family, our feeling of being at home in the world without our knowing it."

So a Rabbi and an Atheist walk into a bar.

Recently, a friend sent me a list of people who did great things when they were old. It was a friendly gesture, meant to support my belief that it is possible to age "successfully." The list included Bizet, Cervantes, Cezanne, Churchill, El Greco, Rembrandt and Tennyson. Quite a group!

Paul Cézanne famously declared "I seek in painting." He spoke of his art in almost spiritual terms, as a quest to reach the distant goal he referred to as "realization." In a letter of 1904, the 65-year old master wrote that "I progress very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very comple

This was his way of disputing that 2014 was the warmest year on earth and that human-caused c

The French writer Marcel Aymé once wrote a short story in which the population of a small town, starving to death, suddenly discovered that if they looked at a painting of food with enough intensity, they would feel nourished, as if they'd eaten whatever was depicted on the canvas.

Every year I hope that someone like you or I will be celebrated on International Women’s Day. But it never happens.

Great experimental innovators are acutely aware of the costs of their particular form of creativity, as they spend long periods in pursuit of the elusive ideal of creating art that will be as powerful, vivid, and honest as reality.