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Politics, passion, and adultery in the Minnesota Opera’s 'Anna Bolena' (Photos)
Authors from Shakespeare to James Cameron have used the power of historical events to enhance the impact of their stories. Italian opera composer Gaetano Donizetti followed this tradition when he...
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Markets, cultural conflicts, and global hunger (Photos)
Buying a tomato in a super or a farmers’ market would seem of little significance other than expressing one’s predilection for personal convenience. The impact of such seemingly trivial choices,...
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Addressing upper Mississippi River pollution and the Gulf of Mexico ‘dead...
Two months ago the “Star Tribune” ran an article announcing that the Mississippi River was the healthiest it had been in a generation. One month earlier a report indicated that the Dead Zone in the...
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Social Security and Medicare teeter atop the fiscal cliff (Photos)
Baby Boomers may remember when Social Security and Medicare were progressive innovations designed to provide a safety net of insured care for all Americans. Over the years both programs have survived...
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Minnesota mystery writers put the hit on children’s lit (Photos)
Even during detective fiction’s Golden Age, few authors in general and fewer mystery writers in particular wrote stories aimed at children or teenagers. Perhaps because the mystery genre wasn’t taken...
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Free educational holiday entertainment around the Twin Cities
Nobody wants to be Scrooge, but entertainment can be an expensive proposition, particularly during the holidays. When personal finances are stretched in many different directions, one’s recreational...
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Pomp, perfidy, and passion mark the Met’s 'Aida' in HD (Photos)
Few operas outside of Richard Wagner’s match the grandeur of “Aida,” yet Met conductor Fabio Luisi remarked during Saturday’s HD premiere that Giuseppe Verdi’s opus would be fine without the...
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New carols from Minnesota composers at the Schubert Club (Photos)
A recent contributor to the Star Tribune expressed the lament of many about “repetitive Christmas music, which is played over far too many weeks before Christmas and degrades the genre.” Even the most...
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'The Rhetoric of Certainty' in the Minnesota Opera's 'Doubt' (Photos)
Reflective of American politics, shades of doubt and belief have haunted many American plays and movies over the years. From The Caine Mutiny Court Martial to A Few Good Men to Doubt: A Parable, guilt...
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Sex trafficking in Minnesota: A presentation to the Humanists of Minnesota...
The statistics are chilling. Over one-third of Native American girls are raped during their lifetimes. 48% of these women continue to live in violent relationships. And 70% of these crimes go...
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The Minnesota Opera’s world premiere of 'Doubt' (Photos)
Opera goers recognize that the libretti of Italian or German operas differ in syntax and meaning, sometimes quite strikingly, from their English translations. Neither Lucia’s descent into madness nor...
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TMORA’s new exhibit showcases the spiritual non-conformists of Russian art...
Westerners, especially those born after the fall of the Berlin Wall, assume that all art serves as an instrument of self-expression, religious or otherwise. But many countries value art as a means of...
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Spirit United and Minneapolis Theosophists search the ancient mysteries (Photos)
The Temple of Hathor, Stonehenge, the Caves of Lascaux and Chauvet, Chartres Cathedral—all these sites once were shrines of ancient wisdom. Yet, 2013 has begun, the Mayan apocalypse did not come, and...
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National identity, global change, and Al Gore’s new book (Photos)
Near the end of Al Gore’s presentation at the Westminster Town Hall Forum Thursday noon, the former vice president and current environmental activist concluded his book tour presentation by answering...
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Meteor impact events, the Apocalypse, and the Twin Cities (Photos)
Tempting as it is to regard the explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia Friday morning as an isolated event akin to a sonic boom from a low-flying jet, meteor bursts and meteorite impacts often have...
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On relativity, the Big Bang and Russian revolutionaries (Photos)
“Everything old is new again” is a familiar phrase to many. “Nothing new under the sun” is another. Both express people's needs for stability and order in the midst of the death and destruction...
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Neuroeconomics, Homer Simpson, and public policy (Photos)
Remember the axiom that “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?” Whether through experience, games theory, or shortsightedness, that homespun cultural wisdom impacts most people’s decisions...
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Hazards of adaptation and the Minnesota Opera’s Hamlet (Photos)
As the most famous play in English, "Hamlet" has been performed, adapted, and “improved” countless times since Shakespeare penned it. David Garrick’s version “rescued that noble play from all the...
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Report on the First Minneapolis DFL mayoral candidate debate (Photos)
Wednesday noon’s debate at Cowles Auditorium in the Hubert H. Humphrey Center gave an overflow crowd of voters their first chance to compare personalities and platforms of the five DFL candidates...
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Resolving the euro crisis with global Keynesianism (Photos)
Minnesotans might believe the recent bailout of Cyprus to prevent a run on European Union banks has little to do with them, the United States or the greater world. But international relations...
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