Robert F. Kennedy addressing an Indianapolis crowd on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

Leadership, race and 'the awful grace of God'

May 29, 2020

Well, so much for those “You Ain’t Black” T-shirts .

President Donald J. Trump and the Republicans — always ready to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as their handling of the pandemic demonstrates — were all set to capitalize on former Vice President Joe Biden’s gaffe that presumed to tell black people they couldn’t really be black if they voted for Trump, as if there aren’t black Republicans and conservatives. But Biden’s remark, however maladroit, contained the kernel of a question: Might a black Trump supporter actually be voting against his own interests?

A world of immigrants

July 4, 2019

As America celebrates its 243rd birthday today, we are reminded that we are a nation of immigrants — and yet that nation and that notion are both under siege. Squalor at detention camps at the border. A Washington state judge subsequently ruling that asylum seekers can’t be kept in detention indefinitely — a Trumpian policy that has created the crisis. President Donald J. Trump — so good at the trappings of America’s birthday, with his tanks in Washington D.C. and his speech at the Lincoln Memorial — defiying the Supreme Court ruling that bars a citizenship question on the U.S. Census.

The permanent interests of the House of Trump

July 12, 2017

With all due respect to Wilde, I think dear Oscar got it backward: Each man doesn’t kill the thing he loves. Each man is killed by it.

For the House of Trump – which is not quite the House of Atreus, Aeschylus not being an American strong suit – the love of all things Slavic has proved a fateful attraction and distraction. There is nothing wrong with admiration for foreign cultures. There is much, however that is wrong with accepting aid from a foreign government, particularly an adversarial one, particularly when you are running for president of the United States. ...

More adventures in publishing: The ninth annual New York Rainbow Book Fair

May 1, 2017

Three years ago, I took my novel “Water Music” – the first in my series “The Games Men Play” – to the New York Rainbow Book Fair and had a blast.

The ninth annual Fair – held on Saturday at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice – proved no less exhilarating. (Pic at right, by Gina Gouveia.) ...

Serena Williams and the measure of greatness

September 12, 2015

Though I consider myself a bonafide feminist, I must admit that I rarely follow women’s sports. I just find men more powerful and thrilling. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want women to have the same opportunities and compensation for equal work.

Which brings me to Serena Williams. No doubt there are those who are secretly and openly gleeful at her loss in the US Open semifinals to the appropriately named Roberta Vinci. Some of these gloaters are racists. But many others either don’t like her or are sick of the media overkill that trailed her quest to become the first woman since Steffi Graf to achieve a calendar-year Grand Slam – a quest that also died with Vinci’s victory. ...