News that tennis star Andy Murray plans to retire this summer after the Paris Olympics and that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to become a backbencher has brought me back to a very bad summer day two years ago and thoughts of what it really means to let go of a a career — and your ego.
Read MoreBlog
Tennis, Congress and anger (mis)management
From the courts of the Nitto ATP Finals in Turin, Italy, to the halls of the United States Congress, these have not been the best of times for men and anger management.
Read MoreA gaze of their own: women rethinking art history
In the late-20th and early-21st centuries, an age of cultural appropriation that has seen minorities adapt and reinvent the masterpieces of Western civilization, women artists have reasserted the so-called “female gaze,” not only by creating wholly original works but by reclaiming the art historical canon, either interpolating themselves and women arts leaders into iterations of great paintings or imagining men from a woman’s perspective.
A new exhibit at the Lehman College Art Gallery explores this subject through the prism of 19th-century French art.
Read MoreThe improbable triumph of Novak Djokovic
In our endless summer of discontent — the heat, the humidity, the devastating wildfires, the smoke, the wayward storms, the indictments, the losing Yankees, to name but a few — I’d like to take a break and return to a subject that helped inspire my fiction and this blog, tennis and in particular Novak Djokovic, whose career trajectory has a lot to do with two pairs of themes that fascinate me — power and rivalry and context and perception.
Read MoreOf Novak and no-vax
Among those exulting in Novak Djokovic’s Australian Open triumph Sunday, Jan. 29, were members of the far right, who had adopted the world’s No. 1 male tennis player as the poster boy for their anti-Covid vaccine mandate crusade after the debacle last year in which he was deported from Australia for coming to the tournament unvaccinated, a moment that covered neither Australia nor Djokovic in glory.
Read More'Interview With the Vampire' and cultural appropriation
Some authors are proprietary about their characters; some readers even more so, which is partly why Stephen King’s novel “Misery” and the subsequent film were such successes.
When the casting for the 1994 film “Interview With the Vampire” was announced, author Anne Rice balked at the idea of Tom Cruise as the Vampire Lestat, the antihero of the novel who becomes the main character in the subsequent books in the “Vampire Chronicles” series.
When the AMC series “Interview With the Vampire” bowed Oct. 2, some fans balked at the casting of Jacob Anderson, a Black actor, as Louis, “Interview’s” main character, and the updating of the setting to the Black Storyville section of New Orleans in the 1910s, instead of an 18th-century Louisiana plantation. Louis, they argued, wasn’t Black but white. How could the series change the essence of the character? (We should note that Rice, who died in 2021, was slated to be a producer of the series.) I would argue the new series didn’t fundamentally change the character, but it’s complicated.
Read MoreFrom Truss bust to dishy Rishi: Can Sunak save Britain?
When Princess Anne presented Daniel Craig with the Order of St. Michael and St. George — the same order his character, James Bond, is presented with — all I could think was that right now, we could use 007, Craig, the Princess Royal, St. Michael, St. George, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Henry V and anyone else who can lend a hand to right the RMS Titanic that is otherwise known as the United Kingdom.
Read More