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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“What a week,” Robert Costa, moderator of PBS’ “Washington Week,” sometimes begins his broadcast. But really, he could just say that every week. Another mass shooting. Another celebrity – or 10 – accused of sexual harassment. Puerto Rico still mainly without power. It’s sort of like an evil “Groundhog Day.” ...
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Well, NFL owners and players had a “productive” meeting on social issues in Manhattan Tuesday – code for nothing but smoke and mirrors designed to placate two mutually exclusive viewpoints. There was, incredibly, no discussion of the National Anthem protests that have been designed to draw attention to the very social issues that were on the agenda. You can’t make this stuff up. ...
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I was a child of the 1960s when rooting for the New York Yankees was not like rooting for the proverbial U.S. Steel but more like rooting for a company forever on the brink of going belly up. How bad were the Yanks of the late ’60s and early ‘70s? Put it this way: The team would have some of the extra players dress in street clothes and fill in the seats behind home plate at Yankee Stadium to make it look like someone was actually at the games. (Ah, the Horace Clarke Era. No offense to Horace, a lovely, hard-working and decidedly mediocre second baseman who became the face of those wilderness years, 1967-73.)
We can remember those days fondly, because as every Yankee fan knows the trajectory of the Bronx Bombers – like President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s view of the arc of civilization – has, despite some zigzagging, been ever upward. ...
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Well, in a week in which President Donald J. Trump decertified the Iran nuclear deal, eliminated subsidies for insurance companies that underwrite poorer Obamacare enrollees and warned Puerto Rico that the federal government can’t buck it up forever, the American withdrawal from UNESCO may seem like small potatoes. But as a longtime cultural writer I noted it with a heavy heart.
As with these other issues, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is more complex than it seems. The U.S. helped found it after World War II, but in recent decades has had an off-and-on again relationship with the organization, which is well-known for its significant World Heritage Sites list. ...
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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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I was working on a story about Emily Katz Anhalt’s new book, “Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths” (Yale University Press), when I decided to take a break with The New York Times online. The headline hit me in the gut:
“At Least 58 Dead and 500 Hurt in Las Vegas as Gunman Rains Bullets on Concert.”
The suspect, Stephen Craig Paddock, 64 – and, according to Las Vegas Police, also dead by his own hand – was described as a quiet, unassuming man with no criminal history by his understandably defensive brother. Of course, he was. The president called for peace and unity. Of course, he did. ...
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