2,374 stories by "Terry Teachout"
"Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Continue reading Almanac: Douglas Adams o…
One of the nice things about collecting art is that you needn't leave home to look at it. This is especially comforting at times when life is too complicated for you to visit museums or gall…
In today's Wall Street Journal"Sightings" column, occasioned by the unsealing of a crate of love letters sent by T.S. Eliot to Emily Mann, I write about artists who have sought to use pos…
"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do."
B.F. Skinner,  Contingencies of Reinforcement
Continue reading Almanac: B.F. Skinner on artificial intelligence at …
"Art Carney Meets Peter and the Wolf," a TV musical featuring Art Carney and Bil Baird's Marionettes. The score, based on the music of Serge Prokofiev, was arranged and performed by Paul …
"O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Heroism"
Continue reading Almanac: Emerson on fear at About Last Night.
From 2004:
On the surface, Annie Hall purports to tell the tale of how his peculiarities alienate the woman he loves, but its true subject matter is how their relationship actually mak…
"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more"the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us o…
My old friend Jody Bottum recently wrote a social-media posting that has stuck with me:
There's a book I've always wanted to write"titled, maybe, The Christ of the Mind, about the deep co…
The Dave Brubeck Quartet performs Brubeck's "The Duke" in an undated 1956 film clip. Paul Desmond is the saxophonist, Bob Bates the bassist, Joe Dodge the drummer:
(This is the latest in a …
"One needs a town, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A town mens not being alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the soil, there is something of yourself, that even when you're…
In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Broadway premiere of A Soldier's Play. Here's an excerpt. *Â Â *Â Â * Winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama can be a mixed ble…
Decca's original-cast album of the 1950 Broadway production of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party, directed by E. Martin Browne and starring Alec Guinness, Robert Flemying, and Irene Worth: (Th…
"Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise." George Orwell, "Lear, Tolstoy and …
"FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured." Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Newsreel footage of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope singing "Mairzy Doats," a chart-topping 1943 novelty song, at an outdoor show for enlisted men stationed at the air base outside Santa Ana, Calif…
"A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world." George Santayana, The Life of Reason
From 2006: I woke up this morning at nine-thirty, an hour later than my normal get-up-and-go time. As I descended from the loft in which I spend my nights, it struck me that I had nothing wh…
"I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better." Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is interviwed by Merv Griffin on an episode of The Merv Griffin Show, taped in New York in 1967: (This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-rela…
"If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and tha…
Don Stewart and Carl Marlow, who held Perry Como's cue cards on his weekly TV series, appear as the mystery guests on an episode of What's My Line? John Daly was the host and the panelist…
"I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done." Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
"A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose." Hortense Calisher, Queenie
A new episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening …
