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Although I took piano lessons for about eight years from elementary school through high school, and I learned a few Bach pieces, I never attempted even the aria from The Goldberg Variations. The first time I can recall paying attention to the work was seeing a Youtube of Glenn Gould performing them. I bought a CD of Keith Jarrett performing the Variations on harpsichord. Then, I found Gould’s 1955 piano recording among several hundred LPs owned by the mother of a colleague. Recently, I watched a couple of Youtubes on the life of Gould that emphasized the transformative and controversial nature of his recordings. In the past few days, I binge-watched the 15 episodes of the 30 Bach Goldberg Variations podcast directed and narrated by Lowry Yankwich. He interviews nearly 30 people, mostly musicians, about what the Variations mean to them. At the end of each episode is a performance of 1-4 of the variations, with images of the scores. The episodes are chock full of stories about Bach and t...

  We sold the University City house one year ago today. We lived there for 35 years. We raised a daughter in it. I built my faculty career while living in it. That house was built in 1928, and treated us pretty well. We made lots of improvements over the years. I do miss the screened in back porch that we had for about the last 15 years. We also miss the many friends we had in St. Louis. Some we can see on FB, although it's not the same. We're well into our second year here in Rumford RI. The major home repairs have been made and it's starting to feel more like a home and less like an Airbnb. We still need Siri to tell us how to get to most places, so we need to work on the navigation project. Linda's into her second year of retirement and I'll retire next summer, so our lifestyles will be different, too. As long as we have our health, I look forward to the new experiences here in New England.

Vaccination is one of the great triumphs of humanity over infectious disease. Smallpox was such a plague that George Washington mandated inoculation for all Continental soldiers in 1777. Prior to the polio vaccine, most Americans knew a friend or relative who contracted polio; today, it’s virtually unheard of, just like mumps and whooping cough. The COVID vaccines, particularly the mRNA vaccines of Moderna and Pfizer, are a triumph of genetic engineering. If you’ve been vaccinated, it will almost certainly keep you out of the ED and the morgue. Sadly, there are some politicians and media personalities who lie about vaccines. RFK, Jr has made his brand as an anti-vaxxer. Tens of millions have been vaccinated against COVID—where are the tens of millions of vaccine deaths? Does anyone seriously believe that deaths on such a scale could be covered up by Fauci and Biden? Get a grip! The success of HPV vaccines hasn’t been attacked by the American right-wing extremists, perhaps because it’s ...

Not to put too fine a point on it, the recent chaos in the GOP-controlled House isn't a bug, it's a feature for the modern GOP. There isn't any daylight between Gym Jordan and Mike Johnson politically, but policy no longer matters to the GOP. It's just optics, and Johnson has (so far) mastered the avuncular optics necessary to win the speakership. But since the point is chaos, Johnson will preside over chaos, with the hope that voters will decide to elect an autocrat (Trump) who promises to make the trains run on time. Look, nobody elected the Bolsheviks when the Czar abdicated. The Kerensky government was weak and Lenin et al. exploited this to replace some semblance of democracy with dictatorship. Trump and his supporters (Steve Bannon et al.) are the modern American Bolsheviks. Yes, Russia in 2017 was a peasant agrarian society and America in the 21st century is an industrialized society, but there's nothing Democratic about the presidential elections, what with ...

There is absolutely zero reason for civilians to own these weapons. If you are not in the active military or law enforcement, get yourself a shotgun if you feel like you need a gun. And keep it in your house. "Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) says he is reversing his opposition to banning assault rifles from civilian ownership." https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/10/26/rep-jared-golden-assault-rifles-maine-mass-shooting-tsr-vpx.cnn

Stephen Schwarzman is CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone and is worth $32 billion. Here's what he thinks motivates people to work from home: “It was actually more profitable for them to stay home because one, they didn’t work as hard, regardless of what they told you. Second, they don’t spend money to commute. They can make their lunch at home. They don’t have to buy expensive clothes, so their incomes are higher.” How much to you suppose Schwarzman spends on commuting, lunch and clothes? If his employees are motivated by those savings, he's probably not paying them enough. Offer them a 10% raise and see what happens. https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/26/business/remote-work-covid-efficiency/index.html

As train wrecks stop to gawk at the House GOP caucus, Josh Marshall has a sobering reminder: "Civic democracy operates through an organized competition between different stakeholders in society. It requires a consensus to litigate disagreements through a prescribed set of rules. The breakdown of those rules creates an opening for strongmen who traffic in raw power and sell their ability to impose order. It is both the cause and result of the species of civic and moral degeneracy we see as the mother’s milk of Trumpism. "Chaos and strongmanism aren’t opposites but two sides of the same coin. One needs and breeds the other. As big a comedy as the House GOP Speaker debacle is, it illustrates the same basic challenges and choices we face as a society and perhaps more broadly abroad: distributed power, agreed upon rules on the one hand or chaos and domination on the other. That’s the civic democracy and authoritarianism question and it’s playing out before us in the House GOP cauc...