Just when I thought I’d get a day off from sports, there’s more bombshell news:
Mark Sanchez is out as the New York Jets’ quarterback, and Michael Vick, late of the Philadelphia Eagles, is in.
Boy, you could’ve knocked me over with a, well, Jets’ wristband. Did not see that coming. I mean, after the revelation of Coach “Sexy Rexy” Ryan’s tattoo of his wife dressed in a Sanchez jersey – how it makes one yearn for Colin Kaepernick’s battle of angels all over his sculpted back – as I was saying, after the revelation of Ryan’s Sanchez tattoo, I thought those two were joined at the hip. But nothing is forever, least of all in football.
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Read MoreJust when I thought I was out, they pull me back in – to borrow from Michael Corleone.
Just when I thought I could take a night off from blogging about men’s tennis, there’s big news:
Andy and Ivan the Terrible are splitsville.
Yes, Andy Murray and his coach, Ivan Lendl, have announced an amicable breakup. It says a lot about tennis – a sport in which “love” means nothing – that players and coaches announce their breakups as if they were married. No Lendl fan here – you can’t be a McEnroe fan and root for the dour, robotic Ivan – but give the guy credit. He was the Annie Sullivan to Andy’s Helen Keller. And by that I mean he did what great teachers/coaches do. He helped Andy unlock himself and cross the threshold.
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Read MoreWhen a beautiful, talented woman dies in the prime of life, words fail. I don’t know why the death of L’Wren Scott hit me so hard. As editor of WAG magazine, I featured her dresses in the mag’s pages from time to time. They always captured the myriad aspects of elegance, how it could be prim, erotic, even whimsical. I remember one smashing wine-colored number that I actually helped a reader track down. She just had to have that dress.
Still, I didn’t know Scott. And I can’t say I have the passion for fashion that I have for, say, the arts or certain sports. There’s something unforgiving about fashion. Maybe she felt it, too.
Suicide begs the question, Why? Why do people who seem to have considerable resources of all kinds end it all?
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Read MoreCongrats to Nole, who beat Feddy Bear in the finals of the BNP Paribas Open March 16 in Indian Wells, Calif. 3-6, 6-3, 7-6 (3). (That was the tournament Nole was headed to after he played at Madison Square Garden on World Tennis Day, another BNP Paribas event.)
But apparently, the big news out of the California desert is that Roger Federer is back in the top five at age 32. A larger racket, a healed back and the hiring of Stefan Edberg – yet another 1980s star coaching players who were born in that decade – as adviser have all been credited with FedEx’s renewal. (They call them Fedberg. Cute.)
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Read MoreOne of the great pleasures of reading the Weekend New York Times – apart from the opportunity it affords me to collapse with breakfast, lunch or a cup of coffee – is trolling for blog ideas. The March 16 edition of The New York Times magazine yielded a doozy – a map, as it were, of a new project from the Macro Connections group at M.I.T.’s Media Lab called Pantheon. The odd thing is that The Times’ article doesn’t give the website. But here it is.
This being from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pantheon has come up with a complex formula to measure historical cultural production. I won’t bore you with methodology – because I’m not smart enough to. But what’s fascinating to me is what piqued The Times’ interest: What does Pantheon say about fame and celebrity? Something I and others have long suspected and that should give our notice-me, selfie society pause: Fame and celebrity are not the same thing.
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Read MoreWell, it was a triumph, if I do say so myself. (Not that I’m prejudiced, of course.)
But my “Night of Beauty” at Bloomingdale’s – which featured a reading from my new novel “Water Music” – went, well, swimmingly. It helped that I had an appreciative audience of friends and co-workers and especially my sisters Jana and Gina. My heart leapt when I saw them. You know what a sister is? A sister is someone who comes all the way from Washington D.C. or leaves her event early in Connecticut just to hear you read. Because that’s what sisters do. (Afterward we went out for dinner in the neighborhood and fell into an easy conversation. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how long we’ve been apart, it’s like we were talking five minutes ago. Because that’s what sisters are.)
“A Night of Beauty” was a night for sisters and the sisterhood of all women.
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Read MoreOne of the great illusions that some feminists and more than a few sentimental men hold is that women offer a different leadership model than men – that they’re more collaborative and compassionate, building consensus rather than creating chaos.
I’m here to say, You think that if it makes you happy. In a 33-year career, I’ve worked for men and women, and I have to say I prefer working for men.
For one thing, they don’t take everything personally. For another, they have the advantage of millennia of leadership DNA. Women are relatively new to the leadership game, and they often ape men instead of developing their own styles. They think they have to be tough when they really should be strong and so they wind up merely being shrill.
But women have also had the disadvantage of their sex, which they in turn tend to use.
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