Renaissance Pundit's Posterous

Confronting The Beautiful Mess of Adult Life

Music - William Schuman’s Legacy as Teacher and Composer - NYTimes.com

Background on one of the most influential American musicians of the 20th Century, who wasn't quite as well known for his music as several contemporaries, but nevertheless left large shoes to fill and a long record of shaping the arts landscape in NY and the U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/arts/music/01schuman.html


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Yuri Kruman
J.D., 2009
Cardozo School of Law

Posted April 7, 2010

The Arab Tomorrow

Excellent survey of where the Arab world stands today, and where it's going.

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=603733


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Yuri Kruman
J.D., 2009
Cardozo School of Law

Posted April 7, 2010

A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac - NYTimes.com

Very interesting perspective on photographic Holocaust documentation by a famous Russian Jewish photographer, Roman Vishniac

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04shtetl-t.html


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Yuri Kruman
J.D., 2009
Cardozo School of Law

Posted April 6, 2010

That Pesky Stereotype of "English Professor"

"She takes on the skeptics and they push her to grasp the 'Core Emotional Truth'—that success in art demands that 'you have to stop trying to disguise who you are. The veils and pretenses of everyday life won’t work; a certain minimum truth-to-self is required.'"

Let Hollywood eat its shorts. I actually like how Terry Castle states what should be obvious about truly good (and liberated) writing. Enough pretense and hiding behind the artifice of academe, critical approval, and tenured inertia. Cut the bullshit and be true to what you really are, and you might actually succeed as a writer.

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/great-memoir-last

Posted March 1, 2010

Jeffrey Rosen: Obama, Supreme Court Justice?

A rather intriguing idea, and one that might work out well for everyone involved. That said, it's hard to imagine that Obama would want to leave the think of politics for a marble hall and eight colleagues equal in intelligence, but inferior in political sensibility. Who knows? Maybe we'll see this, come 2012 (I won't hold my breath)...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/18/AR2010021803275.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=AR

Yitta Schwartz, Z"L, 93, Passes Away, Leaving 2000+ descendants

She was a truly remarkable woman in every sense, from surviving Bergen-Belsen to coming to America and creating a family of 18 children and an amazing 2000+ descendants in her lifetime. She was a living testament to the Jewish will to live on, despite the indescribable horrors inflicted by the Nazis and others on world Jewry in World War II. May her memory be a blessing to all of us, not just her tremendous family.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/nyregion/21yitta.html?em

Brooks on How The (Diversified) Power Elites Have Failed To Bring Off Their Potential

Meritocratic hierarchies have both killed the golden goose of discretion in elites' self-preservation, and failed to bring off a revolution in governance and representation of minorities in bringing this country toward its potential. This diversification has made factions ever more keen to undercut others with competing interests, rather than focus on a long-term progress, and have focused on short-term, spectacular projects at the cost of more sensible programs that take time and look beyond immediate political capital as the measure of the essence of the public good. This is both a sad and inevitable progression which has simply failed in its promise, regardless of how well-represented minorities and well-educated folks stream to D.C. in every election cycle to "change the world" in their own often half-formed mold. Nobody advocates for a return to governance by WASPs, but neither does the current product of decades of Affirmative Action programs represent the epitome of what Americans are capable of bringing off in governance, public policy and effective strategic vision, planning and legislation. Alas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/opinion/19brooks.html?em

Evan Bayh on How to Properly Reform the Senate

Some rather helpful (and common sense) suggestions for how to fix the problems that plague Congress - filibusters, hyper-partisanship, lack of limits on the pervasiveness of corporate interest at the price of the public's good, and a general lack of decorum and desire to cooperate, at a time when the nation's problems loom larger than ever. This is both telling about the sad state of disrepair in Washington politics, and a constructive set of rules by which to make the situation measurably better...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/opinion/21bayh.html?hp

last exit - bookforum.com / in print

> Moral of the story here: DeLillo ventures out beyond the last > outposts of abstraction in human thought, and doesn't quite manage > to return to humanity.
>
> http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_05/5003
>
>
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> Yuri Kruman
> J.D., 2009
> Cardozo School of Law