Tolstoy: A Russian Life

There are two principal models for biography in our culture, and perhaps the first decision the biographer has to face is which of the two will best suit the subject in question. First, there is the Boswellian model: the massive tome (or tomes) containing as much material as can be garnered, following the philosophy that [...]

Point of View with Jonathan Rosenbaum: World Cinema of the 1940s

Jonathan Rosenbaum will be teaching a course on World Cinema of the 1940s, from October 5 to November 30. This course explores important and often neglected films from Europe, Asia, and North America in their historical and aesthetic contexts.We will cover a variety of genres, including Italian neorealism, an Ernst Lubitsch comedy, Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan [...]

Sense and Sensibility. . .

Don’t forget the Basic Program’s Autumn Symposium on Sense & Sensibility and the Culture of Sympathy, Saturday, October 29, 2011, celebrating the bicentennial of the novel’s publication. If you’re thinking about attending and might want to brush up on Austen’s novels and their background in advance, you may want to consider Jane Austen, Human Nature, [...]

Filmspotting: Movies about Movies

The Filmspotting guys are offering a summer film course on Movies about Movies. This course crosses genres, continents, and centuries to examine the fascination of power and celebrity – A Star is Born (1937), the hidden aspects of filmmaking – Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and the contrast of creating a film and living a [...]

Irina Ruvinsky – Proust Questionnaire

What is your greatest fear? Forgetting my past What is your greatest extravagance? Teas from Harney & Sons What do you consider your greatest achievement? Surviving a MOSSAD-style 7 day hiking trip in Israel What do you most value in your friends? Reciprocity What is the quality you most like in a man? Irony What [...]

Original Sin on Wall Street – The Atlantic

John C. Bogle is a huge fan of the Classics. Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Group mutual fund company, is one of the dozen or so “Wall Street Elders” (as a New York Times article called them) who have backed Paul Volcker’s proposal to re-regulate the financial industry, even as their younger peers have [...]

Orlando Does Not Fade: Revisiting Tilda Swinton’s legendary “nonperformance”

When Sally Potter’s free-wheeling Orlando came to the Sundance film festival in 1993, it didn’t exactly fit the profile of a festival breakout. It wasn’t a regional character drama like Gas Food Lodging or Mississippi Masala. It wasn’t handmade and idiosyncratic like sex, lies, and videotape or Slacker. It wasn’t a blood-spattered action picture, like [...]

Reports from Hell

The damned make for interesting reading, and the underworld has occasioned remarkable travelogues whose vividness has impressed itself deeply into our imagination. This course is an opportunity to compare famous accounts from the two traditions that shaped Western civilization as we know it: Athens and Jerusalem. How are these traditions related, and how do they [...]

Tolstoy & Co. as Objects of Obsession

Early in Elif Batuman’s funny and melancholy first book, The Possessed, she describes her disillusionment, as a would-be novelist, with “the transcendentalist New England culture of ‘creative writing.’ ” The problem with creative writing programs, she says, is their obsession with craft. “What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or [...]

Bhagavad Gita as Management Tool

The Delhi Metro is scrupulously clean, impeccably maintained and almost unfailingly punctual. Much of the credit for its success is usually laid at the feet of one man, Elattuvalapil Sreedharan, a 77-year-old technocrat who serves as the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation’s managing director. Mr. Sreedharan has a reputation for fearlessness and incorruptibility. At the Metro [...]

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