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Tony Bennett, 1926-2023
Farewell to Tony Bennett, one of the greatest performers of the Great American Songbook. I don’t know what the experts would say, but to me, these songs, from Broadway, jazz standards, and even movies, are are our Puccini, our great popular art. They are as American as baseball, and Tony Bennett is the Joe DiMaggio……
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Thanks, WordPress!
I read that WordPress, the software that I use to make Letters Blogatory, is turning twenty this month. I’ve been using WordPress since 2011, and I want to take the occasion of the anniversary to give a shout-out to the many people who contribute their time to developing and maintaining the software. If you think……
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Letters Blogatory: Still Against Abolishing The Leap Second
In her prologue to The Human Condition, written at the dawn of the space age, Hannah Arendt wrote: The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitant in which they can move and breathe……
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America’s Pastime
Our English friends got a taste of America this weekend when the greatest rivalry in sports came to London. You might have been forgiven for wondering whether the teams were playing American football rather than baseball, since the two teams combined for thirty runs over the weekend, but the score aside, I hear the organizers……
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Article of the Day: “Are We Alone In The Universe?”
If you’ve been reading Letters Blogatory for a while, you know that I am an enthusiast for astronomy and cosmology. I have often surprised people by saying that I hope we do not discover extraterrestrial life, especially simple extraterrestrial life. I get the same reaction I get when I tell people that it is illegal……