When Peggy Noonan, who was one of President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters, writes in The Wall Street Journal, that Taylor Swift should be Time magazine’s Person of the Year, you know that Swift has captured the zeitgeist.
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Eternal flame: the continuing Kennedy mystique
Wednesday, Nov. 22 marks the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.
Those of a certain vintage can remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the shocking news. In a sense, we’ve never recovered from it.
Read MoreAre Biden and Israel losing the war of words -- and images?
All life is narrative. Control the narrative, and you control public perception and opinion.
At the moment, Israel and President Joe Biden seem to be losing the narrative thread. I say “seem,” because I haven’t interviewed everyone in the world on this, of course. But based on what’s making news, former President Donald J. Trump and the Palestinians seem to be winning the battle for hearts and minds, in large part because the battle is being waged not primarily with words but with images.
Read MoreThe paintbrush and the gun
Many years ago now, I interviewed Renaissance man Gordon Parks — photographer, composer, writer and film director (“Shaft”), a man whose photojournalism in the 1940s through ’70s captured both the civil rights movement and Hollywood.
Parks had grown up poor and Black in Kansas. I asked him what kept him from being embittered by poverty and racial prejudice. He said something that has stayed with me ever since and that I have thought about a lot in the past few weeks of war and other violence: “It’s easier to pick up a paintbrush than a gun.”
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