When I think of O.J. Simpson, who died Wednesday, April 10 of prostate cancer at age 76 in Las Vegas, I think of the short story '“Appointment in Samarra,” often retold in novels. The protagonist encounters the figure of Death, and to elude the dreaded specter, runs off to Samarra, only to find Death waiting there at the place where they were destined to meet. You cannot escape fate — or the consequences of your actions, no matter what else you do in life. Such is the Hindu and Buddhist principle of karma.
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Mitch McConnell, Andy Murray and the art of letting go
News that tennis star Andy Murray plans to retire this summer after the Paris Olympics and that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to become a backbencher has brought me back to a very bad summer day two years ago and thoughts of what it really means to let go of a a career — and your ego.
Read MoreThe Taylor Swifting of the world
When Peggy Noonan, who was one of President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters, writes in The Wall Street Journal, that Taylor Swift should be Time magazine’s Person of the Year, you know that Swift has captured the zeitgeist.
Read MoreEternal flame: the continuing Kennedy mystique
Wednesday, Nov. 22 marks the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.
Those of a certain vintage can remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the shocking news. In a sense, we’ve never recovered from it.
Read MoreBlind ambition: The antiheroism of Robert Oppenheimer
Friday, July 21, marks the opening of two highly anticipated movies that have nothing to do with each other but have already been paired in the public consciousness, perhaps because they both ask us to consider what it means to be human in a world where people constantly grapple for power.
The two films — “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” — have already been conflated as “Barbenheimer” (is that like “Frankenstein”?), with movie buffs planning a five-hour double feature of “Oppenheimer’s” main course and “Barbie’s” dessert. (Well, why not? After all, Barbie and J. Robert Oppenheimer were both physicists.)
I’ll have more on Barbie,“Barbie” and the male gaze in a subsequent post. But for now I’d like to consider Oppenheimer (1904-67), the scientist who spearheaded the creation of the atom bomb and whose life, lived at the nexus of ambition and conscience, would be eclipsed by his failure to understand the power dynamic.
Read MoreMoving forward: the endurance of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
What would Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis make of J. Randy Taraborrelli’s “Jackie: Public, Private, Secret” (St. Martin’s Press, $35, 439 pages) — out Tuesday, July 18, 10 days before what would’ve been her 94th birthday?
Read MoreThe challenge in letting go
Last summer on a very bad day, I attended the funeral of an affable, older relative whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. Distracted by problems at work, I made a wrong turn and arrived just as the priest was finishing the Gospel that is usually read at funeral Masses. In it, Jesus says, “I am the Resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me. though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whoever so lives and believes in me shall never die” — complementary, mirror-image phrases, like so many throughout the New Testament, that Charles Dickens uses to brilliant effect in the denouement of his French Revolutionary novel of dissipation and redemption, “A Tale of Two Cities.”
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