On a turn of history, boycotts of America, a Rogan guest, a math pioneer, an NBA legend, and more
Max Frankel has died at 94. He was a Timesman — a New York Timesman. He spent his career at that paper, rising to be its top editor. To read his obit in that same paper, go here.
Frankel was born in Germany, three years before the Nazis rose to power. In 1938, he and his family were deported to Poland. Amazingly, they were able to make it to America.
I would like to paste a portion of the obit:
. . . at 26, he became a foreign correspondent, covering anti-Soviet rebellions in Eastern Europe. He fell into a pattern of Cold War reporting that made no pretense of objectivity. Like a combat correspondent touting his side’s war, he wrote unashamedly of “the free world,” of Polish and Hungarian “patriots” yearning for liberation but “crushed” by Soviet tanks.
Good for him.
I myself use the phrase “free world.” Writing, I usually capitalize it: “the Free World.” It means something to me (both the phrase and the Free World).
When I was growing up, the Left tended to snort at the idea of the Free World. “Ha, ‘Free World,’ sure!” These days, the Right is more apt to do the snorting. A lot of these guys consider themselves “realists”; I can hardly think of a less realistic bunch, especially when it comes to their assessment of Putin and the Kremlin.
Earlier this month, President Trump shut down our “radios.” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya had a reaction to it. She is the leader of the Belarusian opposition. She cited RFE/RL and the VOA in particular. (“RFE/RL” is our combination of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty; “VOA” stands for “Voice of America.”)
For “nations living under tyranny,” she wrote, those radios “are symbols of the free world — voices of truth.”
Tsikhanouskaya is in exile. Her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, is an opposition leader too, but he is a political prisoner. Belarus is ruled by a Putin-aligned dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. (The country’s intelligence agency, unlike Russia’s, is still called the “KGB.”)
Without blushing does Tsikhanouskaya use the term “free world.”
I wish to recommend a powerful piece by James Kirchick: here. Its title: “The ‘Free World’ Is Gone and There’s No Turning Back.” Its subtitle: “No longer is there any pretense that the United States stands for the ideals that inspired it for 250 years. Europe and the rest of the world need to adjust.”
Kirchick writes, “In addition to abandoning our democratic allies abroad, Trump is gutting America’s democracy-promotion apparatus at home.” That includes our radios. Kirchick further writes,
In place of the idealism that animated American leadership of the Free World, Trump has unleashed the atavistic cynicism of the Old World. In this new dispensation where might makes right, any appeal to moral considerations in the practice of American foreign policy is ridiculed as a deficiency of the weak while the amoral exercise of power is venerated as a virtue of the strong. Instinctive American sympathy for the underdog is supplanted by admiration for the strongman.
We are at an important turn of our history.
• A few days ago, I was thinking about Arthur Rubinstein, the great pianist (1887–1982). He was born in Łódź, Poland. (So many diacritics for so small a word!) But he had his critical education in Berlin, especially in the studio of Dr. Barth — Karl Heinrich Barth, a pupil of Liszt. After 1914, Rubinstein never set foot in Germany.
Not after 1939, or 1933, or 1945: after 1914. That’s how strongly he felt. You can say he was right, you can say he was wrong. You can praise him, laugh at him, or damn him. But he was exercising his freedom of conscience.
(Rubinstein would quip that there were two countries he would never play in: Tibet and Germany. One was too high, the other too low.)
I thought of him when reading about Sir András Schiff and Christian Tetzlaff. One is an eminent British pianist, born and raised in Hungary, and the other is a well-known German violinist. Both have canceled concert tours of America, upset at our government’s change in posture.
To read about Schiff, go here; about Tetzlaff, here.
You and I may think their decisions are ridiculous. Even if we are anti-Trump — pro-Ukraine, anti-Putin, etc. — we may think their decisions are ridiculous. Absurd, irrational. Nonetheless, people have freedom of conscience . . .
Are there countries I myself would not go to? As a rule, I don’t go to countries whose own people are not free to leave. (If nothing else, people have a right to vote with their feet: to leave an unfree country for a free one.) I do not like going to authoritarian countries, unless I can do some good.
Could I do any good in Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, or Cuba? I’m not sure I could stay out of prison. (Many would vote to send me there, I assure you.)
• Darryl Cooper is having a moment. He is a “Holocaust revisionist,” to put it politely. He and his admirers like to say that he asks uncomfortable questions and tells uncomfortable truths. You know the type. David Irving has had a big following for years.
Last fall, Cooper made waves by saying that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of World War II.” (I have other nominees, one in particular.) The Holocaust, said Cooper, was basically an accident.
Now he has been hosted by Joe Rogan — who is, I believe, the most popular podcaster in America, certainly one of them. Rogan has 15.2 million followers on X, 16.4 million on YouTube, etc. I know people who swear by him.
Did you know that Hitler was personally opposed to Kristallnacht? Cooper said he was. He also said that Hitler’s antisemitism “is what allowed him to love the German people.” It’s an interpretation, I suppose.
To read about Cooper’s session with Rogan, consult the Jerusalem Post, here.
Thanks to friendly media, Darryl Cooper reaches tens of millions of people. I think of real historians, real scholars of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust: Raul Hilberg, Lucy Dawidowicz, Sir Martin Gilbert, et al. How many people do they reach?
The thought of it could depress you.
• I seldom write about math and mathematicians. I seldom write about science and scientists. But, gosh, I admire these fields and their whizzes. I wish I knew more about them.
Here is an article that tells me about Pham Tiep. The headline is, “Mathematician solves two long-standing problems scientists couldn’t crack.” His findings, says the article, “have implications across physics, chemistry, computer science, and economics.”
Huh. What have I done this week? What will I do next?
Some more quoting, from the article:
He explains that his best ideas often emerge when he least expects them.
“Maybe I’m walking with our children or doing some gardening with my wife or just doing something in the kitchen,” he shared. His wife, he says, can always tell when he’s thinking about math.
Reading that last sentence, I thought of Lennox Berkeley — the English composer, who lived from 1903 to 1989. David Pryce-Jones told me a story about him. The Pryce-Joneses and the Berkeleys were having a meal. Suddenly, the composer seemed elsewhere, lost in thought. Lady Berkeley explained, “Lennox is having an idea.”
May we all.
• Let’s have a little language. By e-mail the other day, Netflix informed me of an “upcoming price update.” Price update. That is a new way, I gather, of saying price increase.
“Update”! Clever.
• “Slick Watts, N.B.A. Fan Favorite and Headband Pioneer, Dies at 73.” I remember him well. I would like to quote a portion of that obit:
Hustle on the court and eccentricity off it endeared him to fans. Watts showed an insatiable appetite for signing autographs, telling The Arizona Republic in 1976, “No scrap of paper is too small to autograph, because there’s a person at the other end.”
• I loved a “thread” by Dan Steinberg, which starts here. Steinberg is a sports editor and writer at the Washington Post. His thread is about John Feinstein, the legendary sportswriter (A Season on the Brink), who has just died.
In his initial tweet, Steinberg says,
I saw someone praise him yesterday by saying he never made it about himself, which struck me as just about exactly wrong. He ALWAYS made it about himself.
Yet he was great. Such a refreshing, and interesting, thread.
• Throw a little music at you? For a review of the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, go here. For a review of the Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, go here. For a review of The Magic Flute (Mozart) at the Metropolitan Opera, go here.
Interesting issues arise in those reviews — along with interesting personalities.
• Has spring sprung where you live? Where I live, spring is trying. Here are some portents, or pioneers, if you like:
Thank you for joining me today, my friends. See you again soon.
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