Category Archives: Featured
Religion and Politics
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 20th November 2024Religion, regardless of form or complexity, has been a constant in all human societies for as long as we can recall. Politics is likely just as ancient. I’ll define religion as the belief in and worship of a superhuman power or powers, especially a God or gods. The reader can extend the definition if so…
› Read the full entry
Great American Composers – Irving Berlin
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 24th October 2024Irving Berlin (1888-1989) was the greatest songwriter in American history. Born in Imperial Russia his father, an itinerant cantor, brought his family to America after their house was burned to the ground during a pogrom. Irving was 5 years old when he arrived in New York. Raised in Dickensian poverty he was out on the…
› Read the full entry
Polybius and Government
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 17th July 2024Edward Gibbon wrote, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” His great predecessor the Greek historian Polybius (c. 200 – c.118 BC) seems on close analysis by the reader to have believed that history was little more than the register of different people doing the same things over…
› Read the full entry
The Ride of the Valkyries
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 22nd June 2024With the possible exception of the Bridal March from Lohengrin, the music that opens Act 3 of Die Walküre – The Ride of the Valkyries – is the most familiar written by Richard Wagner. The Ride takes around eight minutes, and begins in the prelude to the third act, building up successive layers of accompaniment…
› Read the full entry
Mimì è Tanto Malata!
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 26th May 2024The title translates to “Mimì is very sick.” It’s from Act 3 of Puccini’s La Bohème. The outline of the episode is below. Mimì is dying from tuberculosis and her lover Rodolfo is too poor to help and wants her to leave him for another man who will better care for her. The scene represents…
› Read the full entry
Mutations and Ageing
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 14th April 2022That all living things age and then die has been of interest ever since the dawn of abstract thought. With the advent of molecular biology the prospect of studying the ageing process has become a scientific reality that casts aside random speculation. A multi institutional study from the UK just published in Nature, Somatic mutation…
› Read the full entry
The Gordon Riots – 1780
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 22nd March 2022Andrew Roberts in his biography of George III, (The Last King of America) which I’ll get to in a subsequent post, describes the Gordon Riots of 1780 as the worst catastrophe to befall London during the interval between the Great Fire in 1666 and the Blitz which began in 1940. Those who saw the disorder…
› Read the full entry
Madness is a Feature, Not a Bug
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 18th March 2022“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” The sentence opens Rafael Sabatini’s novel Scaramouche. It’s also engraved on his tombstone. And it’s also true. Humans as the price for their exalted state of consciousness have been condemned by providence to eternal madness. The two are unalterably…
› Read the full entry
Too Much
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 22nd November 2021Winston Churchill remarked that a dominant characteristic of Germany and its people was a tendency to too much. I don’t think the great man was being fair to his Teutonic cousins as the trait seems universal, even more so with every change of the calendar. The descriptor seems to best apply to those parts of…
› Read the full entry
Smaller Brains
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 31st October 2021The human brain is the most complex structure known. As human-like species evolved over several million years into homo sapiens, hominid brain size tripled. Today the average human brain weighs about three pounds. Our nearest primate relative, the chimpanzee, has a brain that weighs less than a pound. Our brains constitute about 2% of body…
› Read the full entry
