Around the Web

For the week of Saturday, December 12 through Friday, December 18.

1)  At the WSJ, Stuart Isacoff on music and the brain.

2) James Gardner at the WSJ reviews the James Tissot exhibition, "The Life of Christ," now on view at the Brooklyn Museum through January 17th.

3) David Mermelstein interivews mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe for the WSJ. 

4) At Laudator Temporis Acti, on trees and the nicknames of Samuel Johnson.

5) And now for something completely different: Tim Madigan of Philosophy Now watches Nietzsche clash with Wagner.

6) Geoffrey Robertson at Standpoint makes the case for a British Bill of Rights.

7) Director of The Cato Institute's Center for Constitutional Studies, Roger Pilon on "the modern executive state" in the National Review:

. . .the tale of how so powerful an executive arose is not really complicated: Congress and the Supreme Court conspired to create it. A century ago, progressives began viewing the Constitution’s checks and balances not as protections against overweening power but as impediments to enlightened government — the kind of government that would one day be used to “save the planet.” Since the New Deal, Congress has delegated ever more powers to the executive branch without much guidance as to how they are to be used. And a supine Court, cowed originally by Franklin Roosevelt’s threat to add six new members, has gone along, in the name of “democracy” and judicial modesty, even as the expanding government has looked less and less democratic.

8) Now available at the British Library's Online Gallery: pages from the score of Handel's Messiah.