Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the banality of evil in her dispatches for The New Yorker from Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem in 1961. It was her attempt to square the mediocrity of the man with the enormity of his crimes.

Thus was born the notion of presenting operetta in liedlike terms.

THE plain of Chengtu is the only large expanse of level ground in the great province of Szechuan; it is also one of the richest, most fertile, and thickly populated areas in the whole of China.

Like the typical Udolphan landscape wherein morals are tried and in which natural laws seem to collapse, the retreat proves to be the place where Louise is tested most severely […]