Eugène Delacroix’s “Medea About to Murder Her Children” (1862), oil painting. Musée du Louvre. The ancient Greek myth — the subject of Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” at The Metropolitan Opera — has also been misinterpreted, most recently in Maureen Dowd’s column on Vladimir Putin.

Our crisis of critical thinking and leadership

October 6, 2022

In his perceptive eulogy for Queen Elizabeth II, Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, observed: “People of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders of loving service are still rarer.”

Ain’t that the truth. At the risk of sounding like the hammer always in search of a nail, I must nonetheless note once again that we are in an increasing crisis of leadership, from Vladimir Putin’s bungling attempts to conquer Ukraine, which would be laughable if they weren’t so horrific and dangerous, to the ham-fisted handling of Miami Dolphins’ quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s concussion. (The doctor/consultant who cleared him to play was fired. Really? The team’s front office and ownership should all be fired.

What does it mean to be a leader? it means you are a steward of everything and everyone in your care, a servant of others. It means you take responsibility, even when you are not directly involved in the action. Say what you want about QEII, put she saw herself as a steward, one who remained on the job till her dying day.

For most, however, it’s me, me, me all the time, and it doesn’t help that people don’t really understand this, because they have a limited understanding of culture.

Las Vegas and the literature of rejection

October 2, 2017

I was working on a story about Emily Katz Anhalt’s new book, “Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths” (Yale University Press), when I decided to take a break with The New York Times online. The headline hit me in the gut:

“At Least 58 Dead and 500 Hurt in Las Vegas as Gunman Rains Bullets on Concert.”

The suspect, Stephen Craig Paddock, 64 – and, according to Las Vegas Police, also dead by his own hand – was described as a quiet, unassuming man with no criminal history by his understandably defensive brother. Of course, he was. The president called for peace and unity. Of course, he did. ...

The Onassis Center’s ‘World of Emotion’

April 12, 2017

It is perhaps no small irony that the culture that gave us “nothing in excess; everything in moderation” also gave us a literary masterpiece whose first word is “rage.”

The ancient Greeks were a mass of contradictions. But then, human nature is a mass of contradictions and the Greeks were nothing if not masters of plumbing the human condition as seen in “A World of Emotions, Ancient Greece, 700 B.C.-200 A.D.,” on view at the Onassis Cultural Center New York through June 24. ...