LATEST ADDITIONS

When it comes to trash talk, it would seem so. Numbers two and four completely cracked me up.

Once we understand it, maybe we can create more of it.

Ten years after Big Blue beat Garry Kasparov, people are still fighting over the definition of "really playing chess" is.

This article has the best lead ever—or, to use the jargon of my tribe, "lede."

If you bumped into these composers at the Kwick-E-Mart, would you recognize them?

Twenty things you probably don't know about 'em.

I sometimes do crazy things to experience live music. In my late teens I met a woman&mdash;a friend of a friend of my girlfriend&mdash;who was a flautist attending the Mannes School of Music in New York City. She was a classic New Yorker, from a classic New York family. Though apparently demure and retiring, she had fearlessly ridden the city subways since childhood, taking the Broadway line at any hour of day or night (her stop was Dyckman Street, above 200th). All of her parents' money and energy, such as it was, had gone into their daughter's musical career, and I was so inspired by this level of focus and devotion that I hitchhiked from Boston to New York and back in order to attend her first concert, a performance of the two Mozart flute concerti. My presence was remarked upon as the act of a true friend, but <I>I</I> was the beneficiary: It was a great concert, and a good start to a life of experiencing the "call" of live music.