Crouching tiger, hidden dinosaur

June 18, 2016

There’s a lot of sports stuff we could talk about this week – including Andy Murray reuniting with former coach Ivan Lendl in an attempt to stop Novak Djokovic’s bid for the Grand/Golden Slam. (Nole fan though I am, I’m all for the “It’s the eye of the tiger,; it’s the dream of the fight, rising up to the challenge of a rival” attitude Murray has adopted. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. There’s no point in lying down for an opponent. And no champ worthy of the name would want a competitor to roll over. I think Nole knows the Grand/Golden Slam will mean nothing if he doesn’t earn it.

But there are two ways to think about sports. Like the arts, they can take us outside ourselves. And there are moments when they simply pale in the wake of tragic events. ...

Education – the antidote to terrorism

June 13, 2016

Once again, there is nothing to say and too much to.

A lone gunman, a massacre among people going about their everyday lives and the usual hand-ringing and finger-pointing.

Although I must say Donald Trump deserves our heartiest “congratulations” for putting a new spin on opportunism – or should that be a new low.

“Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism,” he tweeted. “I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”

And just how is he “right”? In a PBS town hall recently, President Barack Obama responded to an edgy question about refugees by observing that the real terrorist threat to the United States is not from refugees – who are vetted extensively – but from “tourists” and American citizens who are radicalized, like Omar Mateen, who murdered 50 people and injured 53 in an Orlando nightclub – the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. ...

Hey, Hill: Get a hobby?

May 26, 2016

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. ...

‘SHE’ and ‘the woman’s card’

May 2, 2016

With apologies to Dickens, this seems to be the best of times and the worst of times to be a woman.

At a moment when women dominate higher education and professional schools, they stand on the threshold of one of their own achieving for the first time the highest office in the United States and becoming the most powerful person on the face of the earth.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton’s opponents seek either to demonize her and her sex, ridiculing her for playing “the woman’s card” (Donald Trump), or to throw chivalry into sharply false relief by confining women to the gilded cage of the pedestal (Ted Cruz) and the nostalgia of the kitchen (John Kasich).

And that’s the good news. Murder; rape; genital mutilation; sex slavery; child marriage; forced conscription into terrorists squads; a lack of access to education, employment, health care and reproductive rights; cyber death threats to and bullying of female sportswriters (a subtheme of my forthcoming novel, “The Penalty for Holding”) and, that old standby, unequal pay for more-than-equal work: The challenges and atrocities that women face are staggering.

All of which makes the incandescent “SHE: Deconstructing Female Identity” – at ArtsWestchester in White Plains, N.Y. through June 25 – a most timely exhibit indeed.

Organized by Kathleen Reckling, the brilliant gallery curator and an avowed feminist, “SHE” considers that identity and the woman’s card through what have traditionally been three power centers for women – their bodies/nature, the home/domesticity and fashion. ...

Of deflated balls, exposed appendages and concealed identities

March 6, 2016

It’s been a great week for news – sporting and otherwise – of the games men play.

First, it’s ba-aaack – Deflategate that is. You will recall that last September, federal court Judge Richard M. Berman ruled that the NFL had overstepped its bounds in its arbitration of Tom Brady’s four-game suspension for allegedly masterminding the deflation of footballs in the New England Patriots’ 2015 A.F.C. Championship win over the Indianapolis Colts.

Now a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, has said, Not so fast. Taking a view similar to my own from the start of this delicious story, the panel seems less interested in the NFL’s triple role as judge, enforcer of punishments and arbitrator of appeals – a strange trifecta that would automatically make the league vulnerable to the charge of overstepping by the Players’ Union – than it is in the cover-up that always trips you up. To wit: What of Brady’s destroyed cell phone that might’ve contained incriminating information about his altered balls? ...

Fear itself

March 3, 2016

I wanted to take a break from the usual sports/culture posts on this blog to discuss two subjects that have always fascinated me – fear and its companion, anger.

Indeed, anger is often the result of fear.

There’s a lot of both in America these days, the kind of fear that leads to prejudice, rage, indecency, betrayal, disrespect, destructiveness – madness.

It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who told Americans in the depths of the Great Depression that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It’s worth putting that quote in context as it comes within the first paragraph of his First Inaugural Address in 1933: ...

Hillary Clinton, the SATs and the triumph of narrative

February 16, 2016

At first glance a change in the direction of the SATs to a more reading-heavy format would seem to have little to do with the presidential candidacy of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But those of us who enjoy connecting the dots have seen a pattern emerge – one of narrative.

Control the story, and you control public opinion – it’s a theme of my debut novel “Water Music” and the forthcoming “The Penalty for Holding,” one of the games men – and women – play.

Even our visual, numbers-oriented culture seems to have gotten the message. The new SAT contains more sophisticated reading passages along with math problems that are more text-driven, which critics fear will disadvantage non-English speakers and those for whom verbal skills do not come easily. ...