Blog

The Athena principle: Ivanka and Donald Trump

July 24, 2016

A patron at a restaurant I frequent finds Donald Trump’s relationship with his older daughter, Ivanka, peculiar. He seems to be closer to her than to his wife, Melania, she has said.

Jill Filipovic – a lawyer and journalist who’s the author of the forthcoming “The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness,” offers an explanation: A man wants a nurturer in a wife, who will care for his needs, and an independent-minded, strong woman in a daughter, who, after all, reflects him. I myself saw this with my own father and I’ve seen this with every man I’ve known who had daughters. Whether or not he was a feminist, married or divorced, gay or straight, he always wanted his daughter or daughters to succeed and thus women to have opportunities and pay equal to that of men. ...

Deflategate: Iceberg, straight ahead

May 22, 2015

So NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell will hear Tom Brady’s appeal, despite a request from the NFL Players Association that he recuse himself.

“One of the primary responsibilities of the commissioner is to protect the integrity of the game and to do what’s right for the game of football,” Goodell said.

“That’s my job. We have a process that’s been negotiated with the union that’s been in place for decades. It’s something that we’ve had in place for a long time and we’re going to do it that way.”

What planet is he on? First, there’s the NFL’s constant misuse of the word “integrity.” It means “wholeness.” In Jungian psychology, the integrated self is the self that is all of a piece. Alistair Cooke, the late, longtime host of “Masterpiece Theatre,” once said of Marilyn Monroe that she was a person of integrity – a mess off and onscreen. Cruel but you get his point: “Integrity” doesn’t mean “honesty.” It means that you’d be the same way with the president of the United States that you are with your grocer. It’s a quality that the Dalai Lama and the pope are said to have. It’s not a quality that’s usually associated with football players. What a surprise. ...

Gay marriage v. states’ rights

April 29, 2015

Gay marriage is once again before the U.S. Supreme Court, and depending on what the Court decides, it could become the law of the land.

Opponents have taken a new tactic. It’s not about whether or not gays should marry but whether the Court or the states should decide this.

Trust me: It’s about whether or not gays should marry, and invoking states’ rights in this situation here smacks of the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, in which the Court ruled 7-2 that just because you’re a slave living in a free state doesn’t make you free.

Right now, you might be gay and married in New York but you sure as hell ain’t gay and married, in, say, Tennessee.

And that’s absurd. There are certain things in which there must be uniformity of the law, otherwise what’s to stop a heterosexual couple’s marriage from being ignored by a state? ...

Nature teams with nurture in ‘The Professor in the Cage’

April 26, 2015

“The Professor in the Cage,” Jonathan Gottschall’s provocative new book, locates itself at the gridlocked intersection of biology and culture.

The subtitle “Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch” suggests another question, Why are women the nicer sex? and its corollary, Are they really?

The answers are fascinating and complex, though perhaps not as complex as his book makes them out to be.

Part of “The Professor in the Cage” is about how Gottschall, an out-of-shape, disenchanted academic, got involved in the brutal world of mixed martial arts (MMA). His personal story is less interesting, however, than his personal observations. He hits the mark, for instance, when he says that MMA is like gay porn – all those rippling, sweaty physiques grappling with one another in clutches that are at once amusing and arousing. It’s the reason I love wrestling. And I suspect – as the nude wrestling scene in “Women in Love” suggests – it gives men a license to touch one another in a way that conforms to traditional heterosexual society, as do all sports.

But why must male athletic competition be so violent – or at least carry the threat of violence? And why do we secretly – or not so secretly – find it thrilling? ...

Andy Murray’s big, fat celeb-less wedding

April 8, 2015

You got to hand it to the press when it comes to making a mountain out of the proverbial molehill. Andy Murray’s getting married Saturday, April 11 – congrats again to him and Kim Sears – and there will be no Feddy, Rafa or Nole. (Thank God for Andy’s lack of famous guests. For a while there, I thought we were going to have to live with Nole’s Miami meltdown until the start of the Monte Carlo Open.)

So Andy didn’t invite the rest of the so-called “Big Four.” What a surprise. Well, it is to the press. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic have been “banned,” “shunned” and “uninvited.” (Let us pause for a vocabulary lesson, here, shall we? In order to be uninvited, you would have to be invited to begin with.)

Look, when you play for the kind of stakes these guys play for, you’re not going to pal around. It messes with your head and your game. That’s precisely why I made the tennis players and swimmers in my debut novel “Water Music” rivals, friends and lovers: It’s delicious conflict, which is the meat of fiction. In my follow-up, “The Penalty for Holding,” the football players, too, find their personal relationships tangling their professional rivalries, although there it’s somewhat different, because football is a team sport.

Can rivals be friends in the real world? ...

For Nole, love means having to say you’re sorry

April 6, 2015

Tennis, Andre Agassi once observed, is a lonely sport. A singles player is out there by his or her self, and has no one to blamed but his or her self when the match heads south. It can be particularly frustrating.

I was reminded of this after reading about Novak Djokovic’s triumph over Andy Murray 7-6 (3), 4-6, 6-0 at the Miami Open Easter Sunday. It was the third time that Nole’s pulled off the difficult double of wins at Indian Wells and Miami. He’s 25-2, a start that echoes the fantastic beginning to 2011, when he first became No. 1.

But what some will remember about the April 5 final in Miami is the way Nole shouted at his entourage after losing the second set to Andy and grabbed a towel from the startled ball boy. This was uncharacteristic of Nole, who’s tender with children. He knew it and he apologized. ...

Men – the fairer sex?

October 11, 2014

Boy, nothing gets women piqued faster than telling them that men are the better-looking sex.

I had this conversation with two female friends recently, one of whom skeptically said to me, “Do you really believe that?”

Yes, I do, though perhaps not in the way they might think. Of course, the average woman – with her makeup and her Spanx – might be more gussied up than the average guy. But what I mean is that aesthetically, the best-looking man is better-looking than the best-looking woman, that I would take the Apollo Belvedere over the Venus de Milo any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Blame it on hormones. Male hormones give them bigger, hotter, lusher, more dangerous looks that read easily across a crowded room. Consider Colin Kaepernick, photographed by Bruce Weber on the cover of the new V Man magazine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he has a nose like a toucan, closely cropped hair and lots of tattoos, which displease some of the fashion police.

And yet – wow – those eyes, like Cognac in firelight; those long, thick lashes; that cut jawline (to go with that cut body). Ladies, ladies, do you think a woman could carry those off? ...