The Fairy's Song

Relationships are a wonderful, mysterious, often elusive, sometimes painful part of the human experience. The most intimate of all human relationships, according to the Bible, is t...

The torch song has long been a vehicle for expression—perhaps American song's most sheerly visceral one. Two artists in particular have built upon this tradition to express their o...

Posing more riddles than the average sphinx, with its decipherable answers pointing somewhere dark, Song Cycle was anything but passive. I had already witnessed hippie bands playin...

Islands are concentrated “instances” of place, in every sense of the term. As such, there are no better candidates for observing and critiquing the dynamics of globalization. Throu...

Every now and then, a song inspires a cultural conversation that ends up looking like a brawl. Merle Haggard's Okie from Muskogee, released in 1969, is a prime example of that impo...

From Peter Rabbit to Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, The Tailor of Gloucester to The Fairy Caravan, the works and characters of Beatrix Potter have bewitched children the world over for more th...