Nestled among the three thousand or so engraved slabs and columns that make up the city of Xi’an’s sprawling Stele Forest, in the second of the seven galleries devoted to Confucian, calligraphic, poetic, and all other manner of ancient stelae,…
It was during the reign of Emperor Zhenzong of Song, so the story goes, that a maiden from Hangzhou, a certain Lady Li, elegant and lithesome with her dark eyebrows lightly curved like the leaves of a weeping willow, ventured…
Back in April, during a question-and-answer session at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, Massachusetts, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) addressed South Africa’s legal proceedings against Israel in the International Court of Justice, brought under Article 9 of the Genocide…
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me! The present only toucheth thee: But Och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! An’ forward tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear! —Robert Burns, “To a Mouse” Ivan Pavlov’s salivating…
We would rather be ruined than changed We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die. — W.H. Auden, “The Age of Anxiety” (1948) The persistence of pro-Kremlin sentiments on…
Ohne jene Kunst würden wir Nichts als Vordergrund sein und ganz und gar im Banne jener Optik leben, welche das Nächste und Gemeinste als ungeheuer gross und als die Wirklichkeit an sich erscheinen lässt. Without art we would be nothing…
Ay me! I see the ruin of my house. The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind; Insulting tyranny begins to jut Upon the innocent and aweless throne: Welcome, destruction, death, and massacre! I see, as in a map, the end of all. — Richard III, Act II,…
It is the morning of May 12, 1892, and the Lithuanian-born landscape painter Isaac Ilyich Levitan has just left his home and studio on Moscow’s leafy Bolshoy Trekhsvyatitelsky Lane to spend the summer sketching and painting amid the endless expanse…
I The Hall of the Order of St. Catherine is the most intimate of the five staterooms within the forbidding walls of the Grand Kremlin Palace. Lacking the martial character of the Hall of the Order of St. George, and…
How far Lord Minamoto no Muneyuki had fallen. His grandfather was the former Emperor Kōkō, and his father the Imperial Prince Koretada, yet in the year 894 A.D. Muneyuki found himself reduced to commoner status by his uncle, the reigning Emperor…
