In Larry David’s extremely awkward “Saturday Night Live” appearance a few weeks back, he worried that the recent rash of sexual predators was all Jewish – which is not true, but anyway, what I thought he was going to say was that they were all unattractive. (This was before Matt Lauer and Peter Martins, ballet master in chief of New York City Ballet, were added to the list of sexual harassers.) ...
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In his Sunday New York Times’ piece “The Unexamined Male Libido,” writer Stephen Marche offers this revelatory thought: “Men arrive at this moment of reckoning (about sexual harassment) woefully unprepared. Most are shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience.”
Translation: Men live with women. Men sleep with women. Men father women’s children. But they don’t know them. ...
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As heads roll in the sexual harassment version of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” the accused-in-chief is taking a not so surprisingly compassionate approach to fellow accused: If they deny, you must comply.
Alabama Senate hopeful and mall exile Roy Moore says he didn’t do it, so, hey, vote for Roy Moore, President Donald J. Trumpet says. ...
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I’m not inclined to depression – nor do I think I have anything but a great life, no matter what its challenges – but I find myself facing each Friday as if I’d just run a marathon with rocks tied to my ankles.
This is a recent phenomenon. OK, it began when Donald J. Trump became president. For certain, not everything that has happened can be blamed on him – certainly not the three hurricanes (Harvey, Irma, Maria) with Nate waiting in the wings to strike the Gulf Coast this weekend. Or the mass shooting in Las Vegas. But I know I am not alone in saying that we arrive at the finish line each workweek, crawling, panting – drained and depleted. ...
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One of the many complexities that has come to light in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus that is the Trump White House is the supposed New Yorkification of Washington D.C. The two cities have always had an uneasy relationship ever since Alexander Hamilton, perhaps the ultimate New Yorker, and Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the ultimate non-New Yorker, struck a deal that would make Washington the political capital of the country and New York, the financial one.
Even today, this remains an unusual arrangement but one that has worked for the United States. As Ric Burns notes in his superb “New York: A Documentary Film," ...
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Thursday, July 20 marks the anniversary of the birth of Alexander the Great in 356 B.C. in Pella, the capital of ancient Macedon, now Macedonia, a region in northern Greece.
Alexander has been an obsession of mine since childhood, when I read the legends associated with his conquests of the Persian Empire in 331 B.C. From Alexander, I learned how to navigate difficult parents and how to lead from the front – skills that would later serve me well in grappling with equally challenging bosses. Thanks to Alexander, I learned to work through pain, illness, grief. I figured if he could fight a battle with a punctured lung, I could gut life out. ...
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As Lent ends and the Easter season begins today with Christians celebrating Jesus’ Resurrection, TV has once again presented its share of documentaries and films about Jesus’ Passion.
PBS’ “Last Days of Jesus” offers a detailed consideration of what it meant to die by crucifixion. I now no longer watch such scenes, just as I no longer watch horror movies. “Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows,” as President Bill Clinton put it at the Democratic National Convention this past summer, prefer to dwell on happier circumstances. Not that we eschew suffering. Indeed, the surest way to prolong suffering is the refusal to endure it. It’s just that we no longer feel the need to go out of our way to create or endure needless suffering. ...
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