By Ryan Hamadeh An article I wrote that ponders the significance of Culture. What secrets inhabit this revered term. We use it abundantly in an ill defined way, but up close it reveals secrets which bestow meaning to our most profound perplexion. Countries to have lost their way in bitter war or societies that yearn…
Author: ibykus20
Profiles in Poetry: Robert Frost
By Adam Sedia “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” —Robert Frost To many in America, Robert Frost is the grandfatherly originator of “The Road Not Taken,” and a few other selected quotations printed on motivational posters. He is relegated to the status of Mahatma Gandhi—a respected figure by reputation, but understood little…
Clarity vs. Obscurity I: The Essences of Classicism and Modernism Compared
By Adam Sedia Classical and modern poetry are inarguably different. Indeed, modernism’s chief boast is its break with classicism and tradition more broadly. The difference is palpable in even the most cursory reading of a classical poem alongside a modernist one. Yet in what does the difference lie? It might be tempting to follow Justice…
Clarity vs. Obscurity V: Eliot’s Masks
By Adam Sedia Click here for Part I, Part II, Part III , and Part IV to this series. T.S. Eliot means many things to many different people. Like Yeats he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the academy he numbers among the titans of twentieth-century poetry, with The Waste Land hailed as the epic of our…
Why H.G. Wells’ ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ Has Arrived Today
By Cynthia Chung “It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental to the civilizing fabric,…
Calixa Lavallée: Father of Canada’s National Anthem and Lafayette of American music
By Matthew Ehret Many may have heard of the name Calixa Lavallée as the composer of the song “Ô Canada” which officially became the Canadian National anthem one hundred years after it was first produced in 1880. Many know of the name Marquis de Lafayette as the young French nobleman, who changed the course of…
Study of the Heavens: a History of Chinese Astronomy
Transcript of a lecture given by Cynthia Chung at ‘The Universe, Creativity and You‘ Symposium. We live in a strange time. Many have forgotten the power of imagination and are instead bogged down with the reality of ‘practicality’. The reality of ‘the budget’, and the reality of ‘what is deemed useful and what is deemed…
China’s Sputnik Moment Kindles a New Spark of Hope for the World
By Matthew Ehret It was once believed in the west that the future would be beautiful, just, and as plentiful as it was peaceful. Under John F. Kennedy’s bold leadership the idea of space exploration was more than a simple “space race” or plopping a human being on the moon “within the decade and returning…
On Nasser’s Fight for Arabic Independence and a Free Palestine
By Cynthia Chung In the 1950s the so-called enemy of the West was not only Moscow but the Third World’s emerging nationalists, from Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt to Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. The United States and Britain staged a coup d’état against Mossadegh, and used the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist movement and the grandfather organization of the…
The ‘Clean Break’ Doctrine: A Modern-Day Sykes-Picot Waging War and Havoc in the Middle East
By Cynthia Chung In 1996 a task force, led by Richard Perle, produced a policy document titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” for Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then in his first term as Prime Minister of Israel, as a how-to manual on approaching regime change in the Middle East and…
