- Wendell Steavenson: Egypt’s elections, Tahrir Square, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In Egypt, the euphoria surrounding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, last February, gave way, as the Arab Spring led into summer and fall, to a creeping realization that the regime had not been toppled at all. To many, it felt as if the popular revolution, waged by millions in . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Classical Music
OPERA
METROPOLITAN OPERA
Franco Zeffirelli’s production of “Tosca” may be history—for now—but the Met is unlikely to tamper with his staging of “Turandot,” which, in its magnificent overabundance, offers a shimmering vision of ancient China that audiences love to believe . . ....
- Wendell Steavenson: Islamists in Egypt, after Mubarak.
Alexandria was once Egypt’s city of outsiders—a center of Hellenic culture that became a Christian capital second only to Rome and the home of a large and thriving Jewish community. It was an outsider, Lawrence Durrell, who wrote the great saga of the city, “The . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “American Egyptologist” by Jeffrey Abt, review.
Born in Illinois in 1865, James Henry Breasted turned an early interest in the ministry and a talent for languages into a remarkable career as America’s first formally trained Egyptologist. He specialized in the recording of inscriptions and wanted nothing less than “the recopying and republication of . . . (Subscription required.)...
- To Live Forever: Art and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt @ Brooklyn Museum
Who says you can’t take it with you? If you were an ancient Egyptian, you could—in fact, the fancier your burial accoutrements, the better your shot at eternal life. This riveting show, which draws from the museum’s stellar Egyptian collection, displays relics of the middle and lower classes alongside the funereal bounty of the rich. Compare two mummy covers from the Roman...
- Goings on About Town: Movies
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OPENING
AGORA
A drama, set in ancient Egypt, about an astronomer and her disciples’ effort to save science from religious fanatics. Directed by Alejandro Amenábar; starring Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella, and Oscar Isaac. Opening May 28. (In wide release.)
THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN . . ....
- Succinct Information About Ancient Egyptian Cures
The ancient Egyptians excelled in various disciplines. One area about which comparatively little is known is the types of procedures used. This informative article looks at some basic points about popular cures employed in ancient....
- Licorice Calms Sore Throats and Upset Stomach
Licorice has been known to calm sore throats and upset stomachs, which is why it is often found in teas marketed to soothe. Licorice today is quite different than that enjoyed by King Tut in Ancient Egypt, the different varieties produced over the years, including such favorites as Crows, Good n Plenty and Twizzlers make licorice treats a nostalgic favorite....
- Fall Preview: Classical music in New York City.
EAST IS WEST
One could be forgiven for thinking that the winds of economic change haven’t buffeted Carnegie Hall. Clive Gillinson, its director, will continue his tradition of fulsome fall festivals with “Ancient Paths, Modern Voices,” a celebration of Chinese culture and its fruitful interaction with . . ....
- Books: “Empires and Barbarians.”
At the beginning of the first millennium A.D., barbarian Europe, east and north of the Roman frontier, was populated by small groups of subsistence farmers. But, as Heather shows, in the span of just a thousand years these societies of Germani, Anglo-Saxons, Franks, and Slavs “destroyed the ancient . . ....
- David Denby: “Footnote,” “Monsieur Lazhar” reviews.
The remarkable “Footnote” is animated by talk and disputation, but there are two conversations that never take place in the movie. At the Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, a father and son are both scholars of the Talmud (the ancient rabbinic commentary on the Old Testament, Jewish law, and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: “Clash of the Titans” and “Everyone Else.”
There is an awful lot of clashing in “Clash of the Titans,” but no Titans. A pity, for the real Titans were early-model deities, born of Uranus and Gaea; she, peeved by her husband, took the unusual step of forging what one ancient text describes as “ . . ....
- Books: “The English Opium Eater.”
As willful as he was brilliant, Thomas De Quincey left Oxford short of a degree after the university dropped its requirement that exams be answered in ancient Greek; he didn’t see the point in finishing if there was no opportunity to flaunt his superior grasp of the language . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The English Opium Eater.”
As willful as he was brilliant, Thomas De Quincey left Oxford short of a degree after the university dropped its requirement that exams be answered in ancient Greek; he didn’t see the point in finishing if there was no opportunity to flaunt his superior grasp of the language . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “John Carter,” “The Deep Blue Sea” reviews.
The season of quarter-billion-dollar movies has kicked off with a mess. Andrew Stanton’s “John Carter,” based on an ancient novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs (written at about the same time as “Tarzan”), begins with a battle on Mars, or Barsoom, as Burroughs . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Adam Kirsch: America and the Roman Empire
In a famous passage in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Sigmund Freud compares the mind to a city with an ancient history:
Now let us make the fantastic supposition that Rome were not a human dwelling-place, but a mental entity with just as long and varied a past . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome”
Everitt completes a biographical trilogy—his previous subjects were Cicero and Augustus—with the life of Hadrian, “the most enigmatic of ancient Romans.” Emperor from 117 to 138 A.D., Hadrian styled himself princeps, or first among equals, and his reversal of his predecessors’ expansionist policies . . ....
- David Remnick: Does the Israeli newspaper Haaretz have a future?
In the early days of the uprising in Egypt, the Web site of the journal Foreign Policy published a list of the ten world leaders “who are freaking out the most.” Coming in first, ahead of all the nerve-racked autocrats who had reason to fear that the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Roger Crowley’s “City of Fortune,” review.
Crowley, a historian of Mediterranean conflicts, offers a brisk account of the rise of the Venetian Republic, which in the Middle Ages was “a shifting, supple matrix of interchanging locations, flexible as a steel net.” Venice’s power, at its height, extended along both shores of the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Classic Old Cars Are the Favorites of Car Collectors
Everyone enjoys their culture and traditions and is always eager to know even more of their ancient lifestyle - the car scenario is something similar. There are several thousands of models of ancient classic cars that can give goose bumps even to the latest of car designers....
- Ancient Roman Weddings
This is a fictional account of an ancient Roman wedding. Well, at least the characters are fictional, but this is an account based on what we know of ancient Roman weddings....
- Books: “33 Revolutions per Minute.”
In this history of protest songs, Lynskey forgoes close readings of the thirty-three songs he has chosen, each heading a chapter, and provides instead sweeping sketches of the cultural moments that gave rise to them. There’s a rushed history of John Lennon’s political development in . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Nathan Englander: “Free Fruit for Young Widows.”
When the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser took control of the Suez Canal, threatening Western access to that vital route, an agitated France shifted allegiances, joining forces with Britain and Israel against Egypt. This is a fact neither here nor there, except that during the 1956 Sinai Campaign there were . . ....
- Books: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Life Upon These Shores,” review.
Beginning with the twenty or so Angolan slaves brought to Jamestown in 1619 and ending with the election of Barack Obama, this copiously illustrated history sets out, as Gates puts it, “to find a new way of looking” at the “full sweep” of African-American history . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Pictures from a Revolution: A portfolio by Platon from Egypt, with video interviews by Human Rights Watch.
A portfolio by Platon from Egypt, with video interviews by Human Rights Watch....
- David Remnick: The uprising in Egypt.
In 1983, the great writer of Cairo, Naguib Mahfouz, published “Before the Throne,” a novella in which Egyptian rulers over five millennia, from King Menes to Anwar Sadat, stand before the Court of Osiris, and answer for their deeds. The divinities Osiris, Isis, and Horus assess the record . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Ancient Philosophers and Greek debt.
The other night, with the Greek political system in a deadlock and the euro in jeopardy, members of the Hellenic Council of America, a group that promotes the culture of ancient Greece, hosted a lecture at the Stathakion Center, in Astoria. The speakers were M. A. Soupios and Panos Mourdoukoutas . . . (Subscription required.)...
- “Lose-Fat-Gain-Muscle” System – Wisdom From Ancient Greece
I have just stumbled upon this system named after a Greek mythological figure-- Apollo. It is probably the most balanced body transformation system that there currently is. With it, one can attain the body of an ancient Greek athlete: lean, toned and streamlined, but not too huge or bulky....
