By Glenn John Arnowitz Okay, so I have a few guilty pleasures. Well, more than a few. A big one was that I was a fan of the show, thirtysomething, the late 1980s hour-long drama that depicted the lives of…
By: Glenn John Arnowitz In 2005 I met actor Ricky Aiello, son of actor Danny Aiello, at my friend’s annual Christmas Eve party. Ricky and I immediately hit it off. The fact that he grew up with an Italian father…
By: Ramlal Agarwal Why does Hamlet dilly-dally in avenging the murder of his father? His father’s ghost clearly exhorts him to do it. He knows it is his duty and he must do it though he does not like it…
By: Ramlal Agarwal In the 1940s and the 1950s there was one novel the students and scholars of English literature in India were taken up with and that was E.M.Forster’s A Passage to India. It was essentially prescribed in all…
By: Mohammad Jashim Uddin Most Westerners judge the Prophet Muhammad through the prism of Islamic extremism. After all, someone who inspires such rabid fundamentalism must have himself been a wild-eyed zealot. But the truth is, at least as told by…
By: Sultana Raza Part 1 Was that woman one of the Muses, or a goddess? Would an Amazon who’d indulged in the trivial pursuit of walking the ramp be punished when she got back home? Could one spot the Three…
By Mark D. Walker Moritz Thomsen was an iconic author and figure to his devoted fan base, and before his death in 1991 he had written five extraordinary books. Although we were of different generations and never met, we both…
By: Robert Levine In its Ideas section, the May 31, 2009 issue of the Boston Globe published an essay by novelist Alain de Botton entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Data-Entry Supervisor.” Botton laments that many contemporary…
By: Glenn John Arnowitz She was the smallest one in the room. Her siblings pushed her over as they ran to us, begging for affection. But she just stood motionless, and we were both drawn to her calm and quiet…
By: Trevor Anthony The dignity of the artist lies in keeping alive the sense of wonder in the world. – G.K. Chesterton The world loves nothing better than to blacken the radiant and drag the awe-inspiring through the…