Author Archives: Neil Kurtzman
Maria – Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 14th January 2025Maria is a film depicting the last days of soprano Maria Callas. Streaming on Netflix, the movie directed by Pablo Larraín, is a tour de force for Angelina Jolie who plays the legendary singer. A lot has been made about the accuracy of the events surrounding Callas’ death in Paris at age 53. Similarly, some…
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Report of Florida Grand Jury Vaccine Investigation
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 12th January 2025The Florida Grand Jury appointed by Gov. DeSantis to investigate COVID-19 vaccines has issued its report. The full document can be downloaded below. It is 140 pages. I have excerpted key parts of it to highlight its findings. The report is remarkably thorough and well-written. It reads as though composed by someone with a highly…
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The Met’s New Aida – Brief Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 8th January 2025Last night a performance of the Met’s new production of Aida was broadcast over the company’s Sirius channel. It’s always hazardous to make judgments based on a single listen, so I’ll make a fiew tentative comments. I’ll expand these after seeing the production on January 25th as part of this year’s HD series. The vocal…
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The New Pandemic – Very Unique Verbal Tics
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 5th January 2025There’s a current pandemic that no one seems to have noticed. Verbal tics and palsies have always been with us but they have grown to epidemic proportions since the recession of Covid. It has several variants, the most common of which is, you know. So pervasive is the you know variant that it has reached…
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New Years Greetings from Franz Shubert
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 2nd January 2025I can think of no better way to start the new year than with some music by Franz Schubert (1797-1928), the most incandescent of composers. They are presented in no particular order and are selected by no criteria save personnel taste. The Boy Wonder began producing masterpieces when he was just 17 and continued to…
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Credit Rating Agencies – Folie à Trois
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 30th December 2024There are three credit agencies that provide consumer reports. They are Transunion, Experian, and Equifax. They’re all addled. Below are the factors that they say they use to determine an individual’s credit score. Below that is what they really do. Payment historyOn-time payments is the number one factor credit scoring agencies use to assign a…
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Why the Covid Epidemic Ended and How Best to Combat the Next One
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 26th December 2024The late and unlamented epidemic was an exercise in misapprehension. My subject is to explain its brief course as a preparative against the next respiratory virus that achieves epidemic proportions. COVID-19 lasted about three years, just as did the flu pandemic of a century earlier. However, it was far less lethal than its predecessor, killing…
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Joseph Schumpeter and a Broken Jar of Coffee
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 22nd December 2024Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) was an Austrian political economist. After a distinguished career in Germany, he emigrated to the US in 1932. He taught at Harvard for the remaining 18 years of his life. In 1942 he published his best-known work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. He is famous for creative destruction a term he borrowed to…
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More on Hayek
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 16th December 2024Fourteen years ago I wrote a brief article about Frederich Hayek’s essay Individualism and Economic Order. Now 50 years after he won the Noble Prize in Economics I happened upon another of the great man’s essays The Use of Knowledge in Society. It focuses on one of Hayek’s major insights – the diffusion of knowledge…
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Respighi and Verdi
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 11th December 2024Below are the program notes I wrote for the upcoming concert of the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra – Saturday, January 18, 2025. Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) was the only important Italian composer of his era better known for his instrumental works than for his operas. Though he wrote nine operas, they are almost never performed. His orchestral compositions, on the…
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