Arts & Humanities

La traviata at the Royal Opera House: a period masterpiece

By René Weis

The current La traviata at the Royal Opera House premiered in 1994 and almost immediately established itself as a modern classic. It succeeded a highly successful production by Luchino Visconti and John Copley, which had run for 27 years and had featured legendary sopranos, including Mirella Freni, Joan Sutherland, Montserrat Caballé, and Kiri Te Kanawa. To follow Visconti was a hard act, but the 1994 Royal Opera House La traviata did just that and with considerable panache.

To blame or to forgive?

By Nicola Lacey and Hanna Pickard

What do you do when faced with wrongdoing – do you blame or do you forgive? Especially when confronted with offences that lie on the more severe end of the spectrum and cause terrible psychological or physical trauma or death, nothing can feel more natural than to blame.

Why we need female brains in CTE research

By Jeffrey Kutcher and Joanne C. Gerstner

US soccer player Brandi Chastain became a household name through her outstanding play in the 1999 Women’s World Cup. She scored the championship-winning goal in the unforgettable final shoot-out in front of the world and 90,000 fans at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California.

Risen the Movie: a scholarly review and comparison

By Greg Carey

The film Risen retells the story of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension through the fictional Roman tribune Clavius, who supervises both Jesus’ crucifixion and the investigation into what happened to his missing body.

Latin: the Renaissance’s world language

By Sarah Knight and Stefan Tilg

Latin, then, was a ubiquitous and commonplace language in the Renaissance, widely spoken, read, and written across Europe and beyond. If the defining characteristics of what has variously been called a “world language” and a “universal language” are its number of non-native speakers and its international circulation, by the time Erasmus was writing his Colloquies and Shakespeare his comedies Latin had been a paradigmatic world language for well over a millennium.

Early modern drama and the New World

By Gavin Hollis

The so-called golden age of Shakespeare coincided with the so-called golden age of exploration. Yet despite the far-reaching impact of the expanding globe, no play is set in the Americas, few plays treat colonization as central to the plot, and only a handful features Native American characters (most of whom are Europeans in disguise).

Philosopher of the month: David Hume

By John Priest

Born in Edinburgh, Hume is considered a founding figure of empiricism and the most significant philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment. With its strong critique of contemporary metaphysics, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) cleared the way for a genuinely empirical account of human understanding.

The ethics of war

By George Lucas

People often do not associate war and ethics with one another, given the death, conflict, and senselessness that typically arises. However, in this sampling from Military Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know®, author George Lucas argues that ethics are paramount in military service and typically more complex than “good versus evil.”

Why are evangelical voters so ambivalent about Ted Cruz?

By Neil J. Young

When Ted Cruz announced last March he was running for the Republican nomination for president, he did so at Liberty University. The nation’s largest evangelical university, Liberty was an unsurprising spot for Cruz to begin his campaign. More than any other Republican in the race, Cruz has based his entire campaign on winning evangelical voters as the pathway to his party’s nomination.

Shakespeare across the globe [map]

On 23 April 2014, the 450^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, a production of Hamlet set off from the Globe Theatre in London. In a span of two years, the 16-person acting group is touring every country in the world, visiting seven continents in 732 days.

Art in the streets

By Sondra Bacharach

Street artists are placing their bets on a new artistic practice, a new medium for art-making – one that ignores the institutional structures of the artworld, and rejects their role as arbiters of artistic excellence. Taking art to the streets allows artists to redefine the criteria by which to be assessed.

Secularism and sausages

By Robert D. Priest

In France today, pork has become political. A series of conservative mayors have in recent months deliberately withdrawn the pork-free option from school lunch menus. Advocates of the policy claim to be the true defenders of laïcité, the French secular principle that demands neutrality towards religion in public space.

Ten things you didn’t know about strippers

By Jessica Berson

One way or another, strippers and other adult entertainers often turn up in the news cycle. Ted Cruz’s campaign pulls an ad because one of the actors turned out to have performed in porn films; corporate accounts are revealed to have funded lap dances for executives; cities and towns seek to clean up their images by banishing strip clubs outside the city limits. You’ve seen strippers in movies and television shows—usually degraded, down on their luck, in an abusive relationship, and possibly possessing a heart of gold.

The true meaning of cell life and death

By Ronald Edwards

Two hundred years ago, William Lawrence blew the roof off the Hunter Lecture Series at the Royal College of Surgeons by adding the word “biology” to the English language to discuss living physiology, behavior, and diversity as a matter of gunky chemistry and physics, sans super-added forces.

Early Greek incantations from Selinous

By Roy Kotansky

The so-called “Getty Hexameters” represent an unusual set of early Greek ‘magical’ incantations (epoidai) found engraved on a small, fragmentary tablet of folded lead. The rare verses provide an exciting new window into the early practice and use of written magic and incantatory spells in the Greek polis of the 5th century BCE.

W.E.B. Du Bois and the literature of upheaval

By Robert Repino

There is a moment in the George Miller film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) that has stuck with me over the two decades since I first saw it. A bedraggled Max (Mel Gibson) is escorted through the crumbling desert outpost of Bartertown.