The latest American mass-murderer – Christopher Harper-Mercer, who gunned down nine people and injured nine more, two critically, at Umpqua Community College in Roseberg, Ore. Oct. 1 – is also the latest example in what I call the literature of rejection, someone with a disproportionate rage at life’s inequities and disappointments who decides to take it out on others. The cast of characters includes mass murderers (Timothy McVeigh, Osama bin Laden), dictators (Adolf Hitler) and assassins (John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald).
In Harper-Mercer’s case, he had been rejected by a firearms’ academy – too immature and entitled, what a surprise – and he didn’t have a girlfriend. This would be laughable if it weren’t so deadly. ...
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Read MorePope Francis’ celebration of Mass at Madison Square Garden tonight prompted my friend, sports publicist and blogger John Cirillo, to email me a post on his favorite Garden moments, which got me thinking about my own.
But first, a little history. The Garden, named for President James Madison, really was once a garden – a rooftop garden that was part of an elaborate Moorish-style complex designed by architect Stanford White, who was shot there in 1906 by a crazed Harry Thaw over Thaw’s wife (and White’s former mistress) chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit. (She figures in both E.L. Doctorow’s novel “Ragtime” and the movie “The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.”) ...
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Read MoreIn the end, I think Stan Wawrinka did Novak Djokovic a favor. By beating Nole in the French Open final, he took the Grand Slam pressure off of him and enabled him to say, “You know what? The heck with it. I’m slamming that door (pun intended) and going for it at Wimbledon and the US Open.”
All the talk was about Serena, but Nole actually came closer to winning the Grand Slam as he lost in the French final but won the other three (US Open, Wimbledon, Australian Open) whereas she won the French, Australian and Wimbledon but lost in the US semifinals. ...
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Read MoreThough 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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