From 2015:

Sooner or later each generation comes to a great technological divide, a chasm that most of its aging members are unable or unwilling to cross. For my mother, who was born mere weeks before the Great Depression, that chasm was the invention of the personal computer. She owned an answering machine—I bought it for her—but she never screened her calls, nor did she learn how to use a computer. When the PC became a routine part of American life, she was officially old….

Read the whole thing here.

“Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.”

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

This is my first posting in two weeks, and it’s nice to be back. No, I didn’t die, nor was I even slightly injured, but since it’s the first time in many years that I’ve taken so much time off from this blog, and since my last posting was preceded by another prolonged hiatus—it strikes me that I should explain my absence.

Part of the problem was that I was swamped with work, including an extended stretch of theater-related travel that kept me more or less continuously on the go for more than a month. I tried to keep up, but I had to spend so much time driving from show to show that I simply didn’t have the steam to stay on top of my routine postings. In addition, I had some technical problems that affected my ability to post and which I have only just succeeded in resolving.

These are the pieces I wrote for The Wall Street Journal during my absence from the blog:

• I reviewed the premiere of Sister Sorry, a new play by Alec Wilkinson.

• I reviewed Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s Pass Over, the first play to open on Broadway since the beginning of the COVID lockdown, and Jessica Provenz’s Boca, a new comedy premiered, like Sister Sorry, by Barrington Stage Company.

• I wrote a “Sightings” column about Frank Sinatra’s short-lived but significant interest in the bossa nova.

Now that I’m back, though, I promise to stay back. I missed you!

Steven Schick and the La Jolla Symphony perform Aaron Copland’s Quiet City, with Stephanie Richards on trumpet and Carol Rothrock on oboe:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the blue sky, is by no means waste of time.”

John Lubbock, The Use of Life

Allegra Kent and Arthur Mitchell dance the pas de deux from George Balanchine’s Agon in a 1973 film. Mitchell created his role in the work’s 1957 New York City Ballet premiere. The score was written for Balanchine by Igor Stravinsky:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

“Always the victor writes the history of the vanquished. He who beats distorts the faces of the beaten. The weaker depart from this world and the lies remain.”

Bertolt Brecht, The Trial of Lucullus