I overheard a debate yesterday that piqued my interest. The topic was popular music. The young men were going back and forth over the quality of contemporary music. Simplistic in structure, one of them believed that we will never again see the likes of Mozart or Bach - certainly not with the umpteenth recycle of [...]

As a child, I feared darkness. My imagination would run wild, shadows would lurk behind me. I was afraid of ghosts - of the mysterious dead nothingness. I was afraid of being dragged into the bowels of the unknown, never to see the light of day again. But my fears were not warranted, as they [...]

I am lucky to never have experienced the devastation brought on by war, natural disasters or nuclear accidents. I never want to. But I admit I am curious. I am afraid of feeling that eerie emptiness typically left behind in affected areas, yet part of me wonders what it must feel like… And here is [...]

A portrait of a young woman thought to be created by a 19th century German artist and sold two years ago for about $19,000 is now being attributed by art experts to Leonardo da Vinci and valued at more than $150 million. The unsigned chalk, ink and pencil drawing, known as “La Bella Principessa,” was [...]

I am simply not able to understand war. I understand conflict, and I acknowledge that conflict is the sapling that would eventually bloom into war. But why can we not resolve our conflicts in a peaceful manner? Why must we attempt to solve it with salvos of missiles? Why do we think that destruction can [...]

William Sidney Mount was born in Setauket, Long Island, and also died there, but the center of home life for him and his family was the Hawkins farm (now the Hawkins-Mount Homestead) in nearby Stony Brook, which had been in his mother’s family for generations. The property of ninety-some acres provided limitless sources of inspiration [...]

The “PixCell” sculptural concept… is an intervention into, or a manipulationof, reality. The “cell” provides many different functions - choice, transparency, substitution, amplification - and it links directly to the senses… The surface of the subject is covered in transparent glass beads, …[replacing it with] some kind of “light shell”. Seen through this shell, the [...]

I used to read Franklin Dixon’s Hardy Boys series. It accompanied me through my early teenage years and filled me with preconceived notions of masculinity from an American perspective. As I was just about to reach puberty, I was not fully aware of the meaning of being a young man. The transition [...]

Youth fascinates me. I suppose I am not that old yet, nevertheless I feel the youthful bliss seeping out of every pore. I have lost my sense of inquisitivity - the frivolity and vigour that I did not even realise I possessed nary a few years ago. The burdens of adulthood are [...]

I have a love/hate relationship with fashion. While I adore the the visual aspect of it, I cannot wholeheartedly agree with the widespread use of rail-thin models. I myself admit that having a very slender figure allows the clothes to move and breathe as the designer envisions, allowing for greater freedom in volume [...]