David Brooks – The New York Times’ columnist who never misses an opportunity to miss a point – wrote recently that the reason Hillary Clinton seems unlikable is that she has no hobbies.
Seriously. The column – which let Brooks in for no end of snark – had two flaws.
First, it presupposed that everyone needs a hobby, that being a workaholic is bad. Some people like to work and find the play in work, like the writer who’s a journalist but also a novelist. (That would be me.) Work isn’t stressful. People are stressful. ...
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Read MoreI 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. ...
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Read MoreAt a time when the news – foreign and domestic – seems so terrible, here’s something to gladden the heart of many a lady (and more than a few gentleman):
Mr. Darcy’s shirt is coming to America.
Yes, the shirt that is for women what the wet T-shirt contest is for men will be part of “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity,” an exhibit opening in August at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. (And, I need not add, we are so there.) The show will feature the shirt – one of several used, given the need for a fresh one for each take – that Colin Firth wore as Mr. Darcy in a key scene in the 1995 smash BBC miniseries of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” ...
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Read MoreHillary Clinton won the South Carolina primary Saturday 3-to-1 over her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, and all I could think about was her black-and-white Chanel-style bouclé jacket accented by a gumball pearl choker.
I thought about it so admiringly that I wore a similar jacket and pearls to church Sunday.
I could claim professional interest as a lifestyle magazine editor. I could deconstruct the message of this classic Chanel look, which is ultra feminine but says “Don’t mess with me.” But neither would come close to the truth. Even though Clinton has achieved what Vanessa Friedman, fashion director and chief fashion critic of The New York Times, has termed a kind of neutrality of dress on the campaign trail, people like me who crave substance and understand her to be a woman of substance still notice what she wears. (You can imagine what The Donald – he of the scale of 1-to-10 for rating women – notices.) ...
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Read MoreGood pitching, baseball fans always say, stops good hitting. A good defense stops a good offense.
And so the Denver Broncos’ vaunted defense stopped Cam Newton and the Carolina Panthers’ electric running game, 24-10 in Super Bowl 50.
It was perhaps the last hurrah for Broncos’ quarterback Peyton Manning, who at 39 became the oldest quarterback to pilot a Super Bowl team and may join his boss John Elway as the only quarterback to retire after winning a Super Bowl. ...
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Read MoreAaron Hamburger, the short story writer and novelist, begins his laudatory review of Garth Greenwell’s “rich, important” debut novel “What Belongs To You” in the Jan. 31 edition of The New York Times Book Review by indulging in a remembrance of a review past.
He recalls John Updike’s 1999 New Yorker piece on Alan Hollinghurst’s novel “The Spell,” in which Updike – who wrote many sexy novels – complained that Hollinghurst’s “relentlessly gay” fiction bored him because “nothing is at stake but self-gratification.” “What Belongs To You,” Hamburger writes, provides the “ringing” retort to Updike’s complaint.
I suspect that Updike may have been not only bored, though, but frightened and even repulsed. For gay fiction, like gay sex, presupposes the male as love object. And that might’ve been an uncomfortable exploration for the alpha male who wrote the “Rabbit” series and “The Witches of Eastwick.” ...
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Read MoreAs a lifelong New Yorker, I love going to the city and I love leaving it.
My happiest journey was always riding the Madison Avenue bus up to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in spring with my Aunt Mary for work. I still love riding the bus there for work.
But I always exhale when the train hits the ’burbs. Something about seeing a greater ratio of greenery to concrete eases me.
New York is a tough, tough place. Come to it with a chip on your shoulder, someone once told me, and it will crush you. Approach it humbly and it will open like a flower. ...
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