Is it the end of the U.S.-North Korean affair?

March 4, 2019

Don’t kill those Nobel Peace Prize hopes just yet.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in is eager for talks to resume between President Donald J. Trumpet and North Korean Supreme Leader “L’il Kim” Jong un and pointed to the cancellation of U.S.-South Korean military exercises as an act of good faith. If I were Moon, however, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Saving face while losing themselves?

December 18, 2018

It was no minor metaphor when British Prime Minister Theresa May’s car door stuck as she strove to exit recently to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who waited with characteristic stoicism on the red carpet for yet another go-round in May’s futile attempt to negotiate a better Brexit deal. Brexit has been the ultimate stuck car door for May and the British people, a frustrating rigmarole with no satisfactory conclusion in sight.

Oh, say can you see the point of the Anthem protest?

October 8, 2017

A new development in the continuing saga that is the Trumping of some NFL players taking a knee during the National Anthem to protest police brutality against people of color: Vice President Mike Pence left the Indianapolis Colts-San Francisco 49ers game after several Niners – former teammates of protest initiator and onetime quarterback Colin Kaepernick – took a knee during the Anthem.

"I asked @VP Pence to leave stadium if any players kneeled, disrespecting our country. I am proud of him and @SecondLady Karen," Trump wrote on Twitter.

"I left today's Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem," Pence wrote on Twitter.

But he and @POTUS must’ve known that there would be kneeling players, particularly on the Niners – who, along with the rest of California, are to the resistance of @POTUS what Boston was to the American Revolution. ...

The beast in the jungle: Tone in the era of Trump

September 28, 2017

Is President Donald J. Trump racist?

It’s a question that has threaded his virulent response to the NFL players kneeling before the National Anthem to protest racism and his passive-aggressive approach to Puerto Rico’s suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

I don’t think Trump is a racist. Indeed, I don’t like to think of any American president as one. But I do think that he is a joyless, mirthless person who takes no pleasure in other people and strikes a misanthropic tone. ...

Where have you gone, Jackie Robinson?

April 10, 2016

I saw Jackie Robinson in person once. It was at Yankee Stadium on Old Timers’ Day, and Iike a lot of other wiry kids, I craned my neck to take in as many legends on the field as possible. I thought then that Robinson looked old and sickly for his age. (And indeed he would die of a heart attack, complicated by diabetes, at age 53.) The other thing I remember thinking was that he was a big man, larger than life – which he certainly was.

I was reminded of Robinson – the man who had that special combination of physical and spiritual grace to break baseball’s color barrier in 1947 – because Ken Burns’ miniseries about him is set to debut Monday and Tuesday, April 11 and 12, and because Jay Caspian Kang has written a column for The New York Times Magazine’s April 10 edition in which he suggests that racism is killing baseball. ...