Every headline on the front page invites you to read something
depressing...or worse. Except in this morning's Wall Street
Journal, in which bad tidings otherwise overwhelm, there is a little
essay by my friend Leon Botstein, true renaissance man, president of Bard
College (where I serve as trustee) and conductor of both the American
Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony (of which I am president),
that gives us hope that we will not die in an avalanche of noise.