My father, the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, told me once that every time he played for an audience, it was a performance, regardless of the circumstance or the composition and/or size of the audience. There’s no such thing as frivolous fun in public for a musician, he said, even if that public was limited to [...]
“He’s a bird brain” was meant as an insult for generations. Apologies, please. That bird may be smarter than you think. In fact, there is at present, in my opinion, a major re-thinking about animal intelligence, as well as of animal cultures, in general. I touched on this in my essay [...]
The New York Times yesterday morning (8/24/2023), like most days, has news of politics and war. Depressing to say the least. But that’s not what caught my eye. A front-page report was about new technology in which a young woman had a stroke 10 years ago that left her with multiple disabilities, including the inability [...]
Names are an indispensable part of our knowledge. Everything has a name. Branded! Until popularity fades… Paul Krugman’s editorial, “What’s in a Name? The Musk/Twitter Edition,” in the New York Times explores brand names in the marketplace. He refers to Elon Musk changing the name of “Twitter” to “X,” which Krugman considers pointless (as do [...]
Times change, discoveries happen, predictions become irrelevant. My First Prediction (1949): Surprisingly Wrong! I was nine in 1949 when we moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. After a month or so in a hotel my family finally settled on a house. Finally, moving day, dawn of a new life with a yard in sunny [...]
What's in an artful smile? What elevates the ordinary to extraordinary art? Gimmicks don't work. So what does?
