The continuing Revolving Door Policy of the Trump Administration has thrown the systemic failure of Alexandrian leadership – leadership from the front – into sharp relief.
President Donald J. Trumpet has surrounded himself with Trumpettes – yes-men and, to a lesser extent, yes-women – and distanced himself from the No, No, Nanettes. Which is odd, considering his professed love of chaos. Wouldn’t you want some tension, some conflict? ...
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Experts will tell you that the high-pressured setting of the Olympics’ global stage is like no other. It can make the favorites fall and rise again and the dark horses surge to the front of the finish line.
That was certainly the case of the magical two weeks in PyeongChang, whose motto might’ve been “Expect the unexpected.”
It was a time when America lost its record for most medals in the Winter Games (37, Vancouver) to Norway (brilliant with 39) while setting a new record for medaling in the greatest number of different events (11). So what Team USA sometimes lacked in depth, particularly in the glamour sports of alpine skiing and figure skating, it made up for in breadth ...
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Well, it’s official: Alina Zagitova has Tara Lipinski-ed Evgenia Medvedeva.
It was at the Nagano Games in 1998 that Lipinski landed seven triple jumps in the long program, or free skate, to overtake Michelle Kwan and become the youngest Olympic gold medalist in the individual ladies’ figure skating event.
On Thursday night, with Lipinski calling the competition with Johnny Weir and Terry Gannon for NBC, another 15-year-old overtook her celebrated countrywoman for gold as Russia’s Alina Zagitova bested Evgenia Medvedeva. ...
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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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I must confess to a certain smugness as the debate regarding the removal of Confederate statuary has taken on an aesthetic perspective. For years, I have endured the tacit, passive-aggressive notion from some newspaper colleagues and even bosses that my job as a cultural writer was not as important as those of the political and municipal writers and even the sports reporters. (Indeed, I lost that job partly because it was considered of lesser significance.)
But the arts – somewhat like religion and the family – are the refuge of the desperate and the inconsolable. Unfortunately for the arts, they are a refuge that their seekers often do not fully understand.
Some of my colleagues in my present job as an editor wonder about the artistic value that may be lost in the removal of the Confederate statues. No less an art lover than President Donald J. Trump bemoaned “the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks.”
But are these works beautiful and, more to the point, are they art? ...
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It’s fitting that President Donald J. Trump should address the nation regarding our recommitment to the war in Afghanistan on a day when most of the continental United States saw a total solar eclipse.
Historians would say that Afghanistan has eclipsed all our other wars. Not for nothing is Afghanistan known as “the graveyard of empires.” Certainly, it’s the graveyard of modern empires. The British in the 19th century and early 20th centuries and the Soviets in the 1970s got bogged down in wars there but left without the victor’s laurel wreath. We Americans have been fighting there 17 years, our longest war. ...
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Thursday, July 20 marks the anniversary of the birth of Alexander the Great in 356 B.C. in Pella, the capital of ancient Macedon, now Macedonia, a region in northern Greece.
Alexander has been an obsession of mine since childhood, when I read the legends associated with his conquests of the Persian Empire in 331 B.C. From Alexander, I learned how to navigate difficult parents and how to lead from the front – skills that would later serve me well in grappling with equally challenging bosses. Thanks to Alexander, I learned to work through pain, illness, grief. I figured if he could fight a battle with a punctured lung, I could gut life out. ...
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