The world was different then, no nuclear bombs, no television. Our excuse was that we didn’t know. (Although many did know.) Now we watch in real time. Buildings crumbling before our eyes, bodies in the street, a child’s shoe in the gutter. This is not a movie. What will be our excuse this time?
International communications expert Dick Pirozzolo reviews Great Powers, Grand Strategies, a new book urging that the United States play a strong diplomatic role in the Pacific and project naval power as a stalwart against China’s efforts to expand that nation’s influence worldwide.
Commentator Christina Inge warns that proposed cuts to budgets for health and human service programs such as “meals on wheels” in Washington, DC will harm not only people who have worked hard all their lives…but also lawmakers’ souls.
Guest commentator Mark Orton presents a dark view of the future following the 2016 presidential election.
In this independent commentary, author Steven Cushing draws parallels between 1933 Germany and the present, and lays out similarities between presidential candidate Donald Trump and Hitler, Caligulia, Mussolini, Whitey Bulger and others. He asks those considering voting for Trump: Would you entrust Bernie Madoff with the password to your bank account? Would you entrust Bill Clinton with the keys to your daughter’s bedroom? Do you really want to entrust the likes of Donald Trump with the keys to the nation’s nuclear codes? He then urges voters to, “in Trump’s words, let ‘common sense’ prevail, and as Ted Cruz said at the Republican convention, vote your conscience.”
After seeing the shocking documentary “An Open Secret,” Boston critic Sheila Green urges Hollywood, news outlets, theaters and the public to take up the issue of child sexual abuse in the American film industry.
In an interview with Lisa Mullins on “Here and Now” a daily program of National Public Radio, author Anita Harris reflected on how her college years shaped her career path. The interview focused on Harris’s book, Ithaca Diaries, a memoir and social history of her years at Cornell University in the 1960s.
The Metropolitan Opera’s recent announcement that it would produce the “The Death of Klinghoffer” led to a nasty, noisy, public debate focused on charges of antisemitism. Some music journalists reveled in the attention and in the moment of relevance for a 400-year-old form. Cambridge critic Rachel Yurman, however, was incensed by the assault, and embarrassed by what she terms the “willful ignorance of those who ranted while freely admitting that they had never seen the work in question.”
