Departments

‘As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you’ll know you’re pure within’

Introduced on stage in 2005, James Whitbourn's Annelies, the first adaptation of Anne Frank's diary into a large-scale choral work, will at last be released on CD on Jan. 22. Here's our preview of the first important recording of 2013.

Talking Animals

Man, Dog, Rooster, Love: Brian McGrory’s Shaggy Story

Boston Globe editor BRIAN MCGRORY says his dog Harry and his inherited-through-marriage rooster Buddy have made him a better man. In fact, he crows about all this, so to speak, in a terrific new book and in a new Talking Animals installment.

Away Out There

Dancing the Dance of Stars and Space

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope provides a spectacular image of the bright star-forming ring that surrounds the heart of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1097. Also: Like a ship plowing through still waters, the giant star Zeta Ophiuchi is speeding through space, making waves in…

Pleasures Of Music

A Day With Robert Schumann

IN this month's PLEASURES OF MUSIC, an 1884 report by May Byron on A DAY WITH ROBERT SCHUMANN. In this account, the author chronicles a day spent with the arch-Romantic composer, which includes some vivid scenes with Schumann's celebrated wife (who was also an acclaimed…

Away Out There

From Earth’s Caves, A Better Understanding of Mars

Dr. Penny Boston is exploring some of the most extreme environments on earth--the Snowy River Cave, the Cave of Crystal Giants--both in New Mexico, n the land where Billy the Kid once roamed--on the educated guess that those remote, and dangerous, places will provide scientists…

A Charles Dickens Bicentennial Moment

What Christmas Is As We Grow Older

Writing in his twopenny weekly, Household Words, in 1851, CHARLES DICKENS penned one of his most thoughtful Yuletide pieces, 'What Christmas Is As We Grow Older,' comprising thoughts arising against a backdrop of great personal loss for its author, following the deaths of his father…

The Blogging Farmer

GMO Labeling: Just Give Us Some Truth

ON Nov. 6 California voters rejected Prop 37, an initiative that would have required food manufacturers to label most foods containing GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms), but that has not deterred the pro-Prop 37 movement. At the same time, though, credible voices have arisen supporting the…

Nature's Temple

Auroras

In 1879 John Muir went to Alaska for the first time. Its stupendous living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for they enabled him to verify his theories of glacial action. Again and again he returned to this continental laboratory of landscapes. The greatest of the…

Departments

A Classic Animated Christmas

From the vaults, classics indeed: 1939's 'Peace on Earth,' the only cartoon ever nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize; from 1913, Ladislas Starevitch's pioneering and amazing stop-motion animated 'The Insects' Revenge' (plus a profile of the filmmaker), the first animated 'Frosty the Snowman' (1953),…

Deep Roots Theater

THE SMALL ONE (1978)

From Disney and director Don Bluth comes the 1978 animated gem, THE SMALL ONE, the simple, sweet story of an unnamed Judean boy has the unfortunate task of having to sell his best friend, a playful but petite donkey named Small One. Then a man…