Shaffer's Amadeus is as accurate as Stone's JFK, ie, it is hopelessly wrong and wrongheaded as history, but so what?

The real issue is why anyone would take a film, or a play, seriously as history. But people do and that is a problem. But it is not the problem of the playwright but rather his audience. A playwright has no obligation to "tell the truth." He/she has much more important fish to fry. And you can always find out what "really happened" by cracking open a book.

For those who want to hear more Mozart, a few words of caution - Mozart is a truly great composer, but not everything he wrote is truly great. His compositions are listed with K, or Kochel, numbers that are mostly chronological. Avoid anything before K. 271 as much of what he wrote before then is juvenilia. Here are some good places to start:

The last two symphonies - G minor and the Jupiter. Nearly any recording will be do fine.

The later piano concertos - Look for recordings by Stephen Hough and John Eliot Gardiner. Hough plays a fortepiano, which was the keyboard Mozart wrote for, and is far more exciting an instrument for Mozart's piano works than the modern pianoforte. But don't obsess over this: there are many splendid recordings of the concertos and you really can't go wrong.

The late operas - Get DVD's. The titles you're looking for are The Magic Flute, Marriage of Figaro, Cosi Fan Tutte, and Don Giovanni. I prefer the Gardiner again. But the Bergman Magic Flute is very special (although many purists don't like it).

Avoid the sonatas - they're mostly hackwork (Haydn's are better). And the string quartets are not as immediately appealing as other genres (again, see Haydn). On the other hand, the clarinet quintet is sublime. I had an LP of member of the Berlin Philharmonic performing this, but again, I wouldn't worry too much about performers. Most people who get recorded on the major labels will be good to great and it's pretty pointless to quibble.

...is in Walter Shapiro's brain. I simply cannot believe, given the enormous stakes with Alito, that any responsible journalist would care enough about such things to write such tripe.

In the interest of equal time, I think it is only fair that the next time you cover male fashion, you ignore what all the models are wearing but write long and copiously about their attitudes on tort reform, originalism in the Constitution, and American Exceptionalism.

...It says "All men are created equal" etc. To follow Genson-Dubarry's reasoning, that would mean that all women don't have the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Therefore, it's ok to abort andy and all female fetuses.

But of course Genson-Dubarry's reasoning is utterly bogus. I ask Genson-Dubarry to respond to this thought experiment. If there's a fire in your house and you can only save your 1 day old baby or a refrigerator filled with fertilized human embryos, which do you save? And will you be willing to pay funeral expenses for all those destroyed embryos?

Pro-coathanger advocates like Genson-Dubarry ignore the very real fact that rich Catholics and evangelicals will always have safe abortion on demand, as they have always had. What "anti-abortion" advocacy is really about is class warfare of the most cynical sort. It is a declaration of war against poor women and Genson-Dubarry knows it.

The world needs one more article about this clown's book the way it needs more dog droppings. If you had to discuss it, why not convene a panel of the women she loathes and ask them to defend themselves?

Giving this rightwing fool space to mouth off against a half-prepared interviewer is simply embarassing.

Gary's got two complaints and they need to be separated.

1. Steinhorn's book sometimes goes over the top. Based on what he quotes, I'm not gonna argue.

2. The Boomers were far from perfect.

Geez Gary, can't you leave it alone for even one minute? Of course, Boomers made some mistakes They were nothing compared to the incalculably bad blunders of the MacNamaras, the Johnsons, the Nixons, etc. Catastrophic blunders we're living with today. As for culture, would you rather Sing Along With Mitch than Springsteen? Or Norman Rockwell instead of Maya LIn?

Think about what America was like before 1960 - not only the lousy politics, but the lousy food, the lousy clothing, lousy music, the ubiquitous xenophobia. The unbearable conformity and racism.

So many of the good things, the truly good things, are from the Boomer generation, from a popular music capable of enormous artistry to personal computers to political discourse so compelling the most virulent opponents of Boomer liberalism speak in the language of Boomer liberals.

Enough with the reflexive dissing the moment anyone says something good about my generation. It's undeserved and it distorts the true meaning of what we are still accomplishing.

Hard hitting responsible journalism. That is what I want. That is what your Abu Ghraib reportage represents. Go for it. And let the articles on haunted houses and the defenses of "intelligent design" creationism recede into history.

And if you can't publish everything right away, stash copies of everything somewhere offshore and safe. The Bush administration will try to shut you down.

As Handel is to Bach.

And I wouldn't want a world without either.