Though I consider myself a bonafide feminist, I must admit that I rarely follow women’s sports. I just find men more powerful and thrilling. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want women to have the same opportunities and compensation for equal work.
Which brings me to Serena Williams. No doubt there are those who are secretly and openly gleeful at her loss in the US Open semifinals to the appropriately named Roberta Vinci. Some of these gloaters are racists. But many others either don’t like her or are sick of the media overkill that trailed her quest to become the first woman since Steffi Graf to achieve a calendar-year Grand Slam – a quest that also died with Vinci’s victory. ...
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Read MoreStanford research scholar Adrienne Mayor – a National Book Award finalist for “The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy” – has a new book out, “The Amazons: Lives & Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World” (Princeton University Press, 519 pages, $29.95).
It blows the lid off the myth of the one-breasted she-males who kidnapped men for sex, abandoning any resulting male offspring, to paint a portrait of those Eurasian women who once and still live like men. ...
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Read MoreOK, I must take a moment away from the Supremes and their historic decisions this week to protest the idea of getting rid of Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill in favor of a woman.
Alexander Hamilton? The man who gave us shopping? It’s not surprising that there’s a hit Broadway musical about him. The guy was all about the cash. Say what you want about Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, but Hamilton understood that “Power without revenue is a mere bauble.” Precisely. The reason we are the richest nation on earth is because of Hamilton. ...
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Read MoreDzhokhar Tsarnaev has apologized for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing.
“I am sorry for the lives that I’ve taken, for the suffering I’ve caused you, for the damage I’ve done – irreparable damage,” he said in court Wednesday. “I’m guilty of it. If there is any lingering doubt of that, let it be no more.”
Is he truly sorry, and does it make a difference? Should we expect the same from Dylann Storm Roof, charged with the murder of nine in the Charleston church? Fat chance. That one will probably go to his grave Timothy McVeigh-like.
“‘The evil that men do lives after them,’” Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. told the Boston court, quoting Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” “‘The good is oft interred with their bones.’ So it will be for Dzokhar Tsarnaev.” ...
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Read MoreHistory is not merely written by winners. It’s dictated by them. That’s true at Wimbledon. And it’s especially true in war.
The controversy over a Confederate battle flag flying over the South Carolina State House that has erupted anew in the wake of the Charleston mass murders is yet another example of our failure to understand this. The South lost the Civil War. And the losers do not get to display the trophies of war. If they did, the Nazi flag would be flying over Germany today. How long do you think the former Allies would tolerate that? ...
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Read MoreThis has been a big year for the classical nude. But then again, when is it not?
From the moment the Renaissance uncovered Roman copies of sculptures of ancient Greek gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, the nude has defined our highest aspirations for the body, from the art of Donatello and Michelangelo to the neoclassical works of turn-of-the-19th century Paris to the highly formal, erotically charged photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, just to name a few.
“Not only is it the longest lasting, most influential visual form for representing the human body up to the present day, but it has also become so powerfully naturalized as merely ‘the nude’ that we have often lost the ability to see it as a specific historical type, with a particular history, geography and canon,” curator Jonathan David Katz wrote in the catalog for “Classical Nudes and the Making of Queer History,” at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in Manhattan last fall. ...
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Read MoreWell, one thing’s certain: Dylann Storm Roof – really? That’s a name? – is no Rachel Dolezal.
One couldn’t do enough to embrace black culture. The other couldn’t do enough to destroy it, allegedly gunning down nine people at Bible study Wednesday night in Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, uttering the particularly lunatic thought, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” ...
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