Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, is resigning from the U.S. Senate, and many folks are none too happy about it – not the least of whom is Al Franken himself.
In a farewell address that was nothing less than bitterly ironic, Franken wondered why he was going while the P-Grabber in Chief remained in the White House.
He’s staying and you’re going, Al, for the same reason that men harass women: One has the power. The other doesn’t. ...
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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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On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case of a Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple on religious grounds.
As I understand it, baker Jack Phillips wasn’t opposed to selling Charlie Craig and David Mullins a cake, just a wedding cake. In other words, he doesn’t mind their living in “sin,” just legitimizing that “sinfulness.”
The couple sued and so we are here. The arguments go something like this: Phillips has a right to make a cake – or not – for whomever. Craig and Mullins have a right to be served by a public business. ...
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I once had a movie producer kiss me on the neck.
How’s that for an opening sentence? Pretty good, huh? Got your attention, right?
It was at the end of an interview when, shaking my hand goodbye, he suddenly lurched forward and kissed me on the neck. (It may have been more of a bite than a kiss, but I don’t actually remember and don’t want to overstate what was a pretty bizarre sendoff.)
Afterward, the embarrassed publicist apologized, concerned that I would be writing about this. But I was a young journalist and had, as a woman, been raised to soldier on. So I said, wrote and did nothing about this. And I hadn’t thought about it until Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual harassment of, well, just about every woman on the planet opened the floodgates of ew-ness. ...
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In Anna Ziegler’s new play “The Last Match,” opening in Manhattan Oct. 24, she uses the rivalry between two male tennis players – think an American Roger Federer and an early Novak Djokovic – to tell the story of life at deuce, never advancing without retreating, never retreating without advancing.
Perhaps the reason the world is at deuce is because the people who created it – primarily men – are at deuce. (It’s the score in tennis, at 40-40, from which the player must win two points in order to win the game.)
Think about it: Most of the world’s great creations were made by men (as men like to point out as a way to explain their superiority to women). All but 49 of the 923 Nobel laureates have been men.
And yet – you know there’s always an “and yet” – they have consistently destroyed the worlds they have created. You could say that this is the human condition, but in fact it’s the male condition. ...
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Amanda Hess’ Sunday New York Times Magazine piece about our ambivalence toward anti-aging is but the latest commentary about the disconnect between ourselves and our bodies, and by “ourselves” I mean women and their bodies. It is a disconnect that affects men as well – though not to the extent that it does women.
Hess describes how Allure magazine has declared war on “anti-aging,” featuring Helen Mirren on the cover, draped in a boy-toy – the same Helen Mirren who played Cleopatra, of whom Shakespeare wrote, “Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
And yet, Hess notes, the same issue of Allure carried an ad for the new L’Oréal Paris moisturizer, part of its Age Perfect brand (of which I’m a big fan), featuring – you guessed it, Helen Mirren. ...
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She was born at the beginning of one summer and died toward the end of another. And like the season that framed her life – deceptively soft, blinding in its glare – hers was too short.
Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the passing of Diana, Princess of Wales. Time is a funny thing. It heals, they say, all wounds, carrying us out on its merciless tide. But what it really is is another country. The world is a very different place now than the one Diana left. ...
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