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There’s nothing like a new bromance to get the creative juices flowing: Both Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers outdid themselves with their comic analyses of the lovefest between President Donald J. Triump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani at the White House Nov. 21 – this after the two politicians traded the most abject insults amid Mamdani’s meteoric rise.
Next year marks the United States’ 250th birthday and already plans are underway for the celebration, with the nonprofit America250 Commission https://america250.org/ charged with staging different events and programs to mark the occasion. (Each of the 50 states has also created its own commission, with plenty of cultural organizations contributing exhibits and performances.)
Though ostensibly bipartisan, America250 has come under the aegis of the Trump Administration, which wants to ensure that American history is portrayed in such a way that Americans don’t feel ashamed of their past. But Ken Burns – whose “The American Revolution” aired on PBS Nov. 16 through Nov. 21 and is streaming free there through Dec. 14 – has said in interviews that we owe it to ourselves to tell the truth about the revolution and let the chips fall where they may. Far from shaming us, Burns and producing partner Sarah Botstein have said, the revolution should inspire and enlighten us as ordinary citizens overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to buck the British Empire and create the world’s oldest modern democracy.
“The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” – Corinthians 3:6
In W. Somerset Maugham’s much-adapted 1927 play “The Letter,” a spurned woman kills her rejecting lover, then passes the crime off as an attempted rape and self-defense. Her story seems plausible but for one thing – an incriminating letter inviting her lover to her home while her husband is away, a letter that’s in the hands of the lover’s mistress.
No one writes letters anymore, we’re told, but they do write lots and lots of emails, which they apparently never delete. Will the thousands of emails released from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate ultimately prove to be politically lethal?
Robert Redford — the actor, Oscar-winning director, Sundance Institute and Festival founder, environmentalist and activist, who died Tuesday, Sept. 16, at 89 — has been mourned with many tributes, and rightly so.
He was a gifted movie star but more important, he was a gifted artist and humanitarian whose best films blended art, commerce and civics without being pretentious, crass or preachy.
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So Friday, Sept. 5, Novak Djokovic will play Carlos Alcaraz in the first semifinal of the US Open men’s singles championship — a match that virtually everyone sees as a fruitless quest to win his 25th Slam singles title and thus break the record he holds with Margaret Court.
Even if by some miracle Djokovic could beat the magnetic, mercurial Alcaraz, he undoubtedly would have to play the flawless, flawlessly robotic Jannik Sinner on Sunday, Sept. 7. It’s the kind of back-to-back challenge that Djokovic faced and met many times in the last decade. Now 38, however, it seems an unattainable double bill, even though this will be his fourth Slam semifinal appearance this year — a not-too-shabby achievement in a career of not-too-shabby achievements — one that has brought him full circle.