Back before Jumbotrons, in Spain's Siglo de Oro, action on a field could be hard to make out, and as Diego Velázquez shows in Philip IV Hunting Wild Boar (1632–37), not everyone in the crowd is there for the bloodsport. To see and be seen, to mingle, to enjoy the fresh air—these are reasons enough to have shown up for the festivities.

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In August 2013, two years after our family traded the Upper West Side of Manhattan for Hawaii's Valley Isle, the Maui Academy of Performing Arts put on Les Misérables, a mammoth project involving 58 actors, an offstage chorus of 17, and a 26-piece live orchestra. The director was David C. Johnston, a mainland-born and -trained Svengali who fetched up on Maui in 1992 and never looked back, forging community players of varying talent along with the occasional seasoned pro into quality ensembles. Ranging from Macbeth to Damn Yankees, Johnston seldom failed to blow skeptical or cautiously managed expectations to something like smithereens. But was the Maui Les Miz"better than Broadway!," as patronizing home-town cheerleaders kept insisting?

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On June 15, The New Yorker published Alex Ross's article "Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age: The great German philosopher, who died in March, understood how much depended on a principled public sphere." Philosophy is out of my depth, pretty much, but the sharp intelligence at work in Alex's prize-winning music journalism and books is well known to me, and his subtitle struck an instant spark with the enlightened, responsible denizen of Spaceship Earth I aspire to be. But no sooner did I start reading than I hit this stumbling block:

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Critic's choice

Gary Oldman—our vote for best screen actor of the year

Connoisseur, October 1990

If the movies he has played in tell the truth about him, Gary Oldman is not scared of the dark. He courts it; he revels in it; he flies to it like the moth to the flame. His face is never more radiant than an instant before the lights go out.

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I first met David Hockney two decades ago as chronicler of the first cycles of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, the sort of assignment that comes one's way once in a lifetime. Of the candidates put forward to work with David, he selected the German painter Matthias Weischer, and it's safe to say that I learned at least as much from the encounters I witnessed as either of the principals. In the years that followed, I kept in sporadic touch with both as opportunities arose.

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