A depiction of the murder of St. Thomas Becket by knights of his friend King Henry II of England. From the Carrow Psalter, 1250, ink, gold and parchment. Courtesy Walters Art Museum.
OK, so who had Pope Leo XIV versus President Donald J. Trump on their fight card, let alone bingo card?
Today, many shocked posters on the internet are saying they didn’t. But I did.
Read More“The Bier of Iskandar” illustrates a scene from the “Great Mongol Shahnameh” (the Persian “Book of Kings”), which recasts the life of Iskandar, or Alexander the Great, as a Persian ruler rather than a Greco-Macedonian one (circa 1330, ink, gold and watercolors). Courtesy Freer Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Lost in the fog of war or any geopolitical crisis is its cultural-historical aspect. This is especially true of the Iran War, which reveals a clash of cultures that in some ways are surprisingly similar.
It was President George W. Bush who said that Americans are not good at looking in the rearview mirror. And so lost on the United States is the irony of a country that fought a revolution against an empire that never understand it only to become an empire that never understood the countries it kept invading.
Read MoreFrom left, Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the 1939 adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” still my favorite of the many adaptations, never more so than in this scene of the wild, rough-hewn characters on their beloved Yorkshire moors. I keep a framed copy of this movie still in my library.
As a collector of “Wuthering Heights” interpretations —Emily Brontë’s novel being the inspiration for my revenge family drama “Seamless Sky” — I was intrigued then disappointed by the announcement of a new film adaptation. I haven’t seen it, but what I have seen of it makes me think Margot Robbie is all wrong for the part of Cathy, not the least of which being that she’s a blonde.
The fair Ralph Fiennes and the French Juliette Binoche would’ve seemed all wrong for the 1992 film “Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.” But they have such talent and chemistry that they are among my favorite Cathys and Healthcliffs, never more so than in their scenes on the Yorkshire moors where their perverse, almost Luciferian defiance of everything and everyone but themselves and the natural world sows the seeds for their haunting, destructive story arc.
Read MoreFormer Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse seen in his 2016 U.S. Senate portrait. He’s announced that at 53 he has terminal pancreatic cancer. Courtesy U.S. Senate.
Ryan Holiday’s “The Daily Stoic” – generally inspirational although too hard on Alexander the Great and too easy on Marcus Aurelius – says that December is the month of endings in which we must contemplate our own. Meanwhile, there have been a number of high profile endings of different sorts, so let’s delve into them, shall we?
Read MoreBette Davis’ murderous adulteress, seen here with costar Herbert Marshall as her duped husband, finds she cannot outrun her past, in the form of an incriminating missive, in “The Letter” (1940). Courtesy Warner Bros.
“The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” – Corinthians 3:6
In W. Somerset Maugham’s much-adapted 1927 play “The Letter,” a spurned woman kills her rejecting lover, then passes the crime off as an attempted rape and self-defense. Her story seems plausible but for one thing – an incriminating letter inviting her lover to her home while her husband is away, a letter that’s in the hands of the lover’s mistress.
No one writes letters anymore, we’re told, but they do write lots and lots of emails, which they apparently never delete. Will the thousands of emails released from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate ultimately prove to be politically lethal?
Read MoreJohn Everett Millais’ “Ophelia” (circa 1851, oil on canvas), for which the artist and poet Elizabeth Siddall posed, helped inspire Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia. Courtesy the Tate Britain.
Why does a billionaire feminist continue to write songs about being rescued from towers by men who “were just honing their powers”?
Read MorePresident Donald J. Trump campaigning in Arizona in 2016 wearing one of his MAGA hats. Recently, he and members of MAGA have disagreed over the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Photograph by Gage Skidmore.
President Donald J. Trump is learning all about karmic comeuppance with regard to the Jeffrey Epstein files. …
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