Mar 26, 2017
Is it OK for a teenager to prefer John Lennon's tepid version of Money to Barret Strong's hard-rocking original? Rickie Lee Jones says it is, deftly arguing that we need different music at different phases of life. She should know: her 1979 debut album included the enormously popular Chuck E's in Love, and she's been at...
Mar 19, 2017
This Lakota musician is a universalist, alert to the commonalities among religions, nations, people. In our conversation at the New York Baha'i Center, he notes that nearly every culture has some kind of flute and some form of fasting. Is the latter a protest against the former? Certainly not. He himself is a flute...
Mar 12, 2017
A past president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, she has a chilling awareness of the harm that can be done by dangerous nincompoops in power, and yet she is surprisingly optimistic. We spoke at Planthouse Gallery about Rachel Carson, climate change, and the terrifying, if unlikely, prospect of being on...
Mar 5, 2017
The brilliant editor Maxwell Perkins carved Thomas Wolfe's crate of pages - 333,000 words! - into Look Homeward, Angel. George Vecsey, much admired former sports columnist for the Times, thinks Perkins cut too much, by 100,000 words. Most readers side with Perkins. (And by "most readers," I mean me.) Plus he describes...