This is a good time of the year to do some reading before the season starts in full swing with school and other activities. Yesterday morning I was up early and picked up a book called ‘The Death of Common Sense’, by Philip Howard, and finished it while waiting for the family to wake up. Subtitled ‘How Law is Suffocating
By accident, while searching on the web, I came across an excellent article on trauma in the
Finally I’d like to recommend a thought provoking article published In These Times and written by my own daughter Silja Talvi, ‘Narcissists “R” Us?’. Partially a book review of Christopher Lasch’s “Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations” but with plenty of personal research and content, the article brings to mind many self-important people whom one can picture looking in the mirror the first thing in the morning and saying “God is great, but so am I”. Out of curiosity I checked on publicity of several arts organizations and discovered a few mug shots of conductors representing an orchestra, but of no directors of an opera or a dance company, unless they are performers themselves. Perhaps a truly charismatic conductor can attract an audience with his photo (Michael Tilson-Thomas in San Francisco comes to mind), but orchestras often play better for visiting maestros, and after all it is the players who produce all the music, not the man with the baton. Opera companies like to show scenes from a production, as do ballet groups, or perhaps they display photos of their star soloists. We would feel it was absurd if a baseball or football team would feature its coach as the main attraction, as important a function as he serves. Surely there are narcissists leading those organizations, too, but enough common sense is alive in this case to keep them in the background where they belong.