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Dec 6, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Pat Rogers
Recent stories of note:“Lines of Insight”Stephen Smith, Literary ReviewPiet Mondrian is known, of course, for his red, yellow, and blue. And after he made the switch from Post-Impressionism to De Stijl, he apparently stuck to his guns: during the Blitz, when friends told him to flee London and head to the country, he replied, “It is too green.” A new biography tells the story of the idiosyncratic artist whose life, unlike Van Gogh or Caravaggio, has yet to capture the public imagination.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Rogers
But Bonhoeffer is known to history not simply as a victim of Nazi horror but as a theologian of note. His appeal is startlingly ecumenical: He finds adherents across the Christian spectrum from conservative evangelicals to Lutherans (of various stripes) to liberal Protestants to celebrants of the death of God.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Rogers
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are leading a team of detectives to ferret out waste and fraud in the federal budget with an eye to cutting as much as $2 trillion in federal spending. That will not be easy to do: every program has an army of career employees, lobbyists, and journalists ready to defend it. Nevertheless, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, team is already compiling a list of programs and agencies to be cut or severely reduced in scale.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Rogers
His bio begins, “At only 29 years old . . .” The bio is that of Filippo Gorini, who appeared at Weill Recital Hall on November 21. He is an Italian pianist. As a rule, bios mention the age of the musician when they are young. And, again, when they are (very) old. In between: silence, on the question of age. People hang on to their twenties, don’t they? “I’m twenty-nine. Not yet thirty, baby!” Do they hang on to their teens, too? Last week, the pianist Yunchan Lim appeared with the New York Philharmonic.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Rogers
Poetry:Samantha Rose Hill on What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt at the Strand Bookstore, New York (December 11): Hannah Arendt courted controversy for as long as she wrote—and continued to do so well after her death in 1975. Her Origins of Totalitarianism garnered criticism for assigning partial responsibility to European Jewry for anti-Semitism on the continent.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Emily Smith |Theodore Dalrymple |Douglas Murray |Pat Rogers
Kazuki Yamada, from Japan, is the music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, in England. That position has proven a stepping-stone to yet bigger podiums. But it is a big and distinguished podium in itself. On Saturday night, Maestro Yamada guest-conducted the New York Philharmonic. The opening piece was a short one by a friend and countryman of his: Dai Fujikura, born in 1977. I will discuss this piece in a forthcoming chronicle for the magazine, which is to say, the print magazine.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Paul Tucker |Emily Smith |Douglas Murray
In any form, Shakespeare’s Macbeth carries a whiff of superstition and a presentiment of bad luck. Washington National Opera’s current production of Giuseppe Verdi’s operatic version, its first Macbeth in seventeen years, opened to a capital suffused with apprehension and a profound sense of foreboding following the extraordinary reelection of Donald J. Trump.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Paul Tucker |Theodore Dalrymple |Douglas Murray |Emily Smith
Nonfiction:Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London, by Amy Helen Bell (Yale University Press): While the Blitz cast a pall over London, life went on, though precautions were taken. “Mecca’s Paramount Dance Hall on Tottenham Court Road had a 9-foot wall of sandbags built around its entrance, and the manager was also the local air-raid warden.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Paul Tucker |Douglas Murray |Theodore Dalrymple |Emily Smith
Last week was a very good one for orchestras in New York. The Berlin Philharmonic played two programs at Carnegie Hall. So did the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. There was also the hometown orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, which performed under the baton of Paavo Järvi. For my review of the New Yorkers’ Wednesday concert, go here. For my review of the Berliners’ Monday concert, go here. The Amsterdammers played on Friday and Saturday nights.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Pat Rogers
Frederick Seidel’s poems have been cranky, preposterous, but almost never stale, flat, or unprofitable. He enjoys that rare ability to surprise you with lines immediately memorable, yet unlike anyone else’s:Days of snow padded the sparking silence—still 1955—Of my friend’s Princeton dorm, empty at Christmas,No one around, the sound of Bach from somewhere,The smell of snow still falling, snow in my nostrils,Snow outside the windowsMy breath steamed up,A foghorn of silence inflaming the air.
