Ezra Pound once described classic literature as “news that stays news.” If I had to choose a composer whose music most often continues to give us “news,” I would pick Ludwig van Beethoven. Bach’s work is more perfectly constructed; Mozart’s is more miraculously balanced; Wagner may have been an even more influential figure (for good and ill)—and, of course, many other composers have written extraordinary pieces. But Beethoven is so gigantic, so utterly all over the place, so human—by turns funny, furious, warmly affectionate, unreachably isolated—that he seems the musician who forever inspires both the question “What the hell did he mean by that?” and the desire to investigate further. READ ON

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would force the United States into World War II. As President Franklin Roosevelt had said almost a year earlier to Congress, on January 6, “At no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today.” Roosevelt then enumerated the four freedoms that were necessary for a nation to survive. Working from his home in Arlington, Vermont, Norman Rockwell, one of America’s most celebrated artists and illustrators, labored throughout the next year to complete a series of paintings for The Saturday Evening Post that illustrated those principles. READ ON