Blog

Sam Reid, who plays the title role on AMC’s “The Vampire Lestat,” at San Diego Comic Con 2025. *Photograph by Tara Taralynn/Wikipedia.*

Trauma and transcendence — interlude with 'The Vampire Lestat'

July 30, 2026

What makes a great fictional character?

Hint: It doesn’t take a great work of literature or a wonderful human being.

Scarlett O’Hara — the Southern belle at the heart of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” — may be as self-centered as they come. But her refusal to accept defeat — no, nor none of her kinfolk, as she famously vows — in the face of the Civil War grabs you by the throat, holds you and won’t let you go.

In 1976, Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire” — inspired by her grief over the loss of her daughter, nicknamed Claudia, to childhood leukemia — introduced us to another indomitable spirit. Over the course of the 13-volume “The Vampire Chronicles,” the French-born, 18th-century vampire Lestat de Lioncourt would earn a place in the pantheons of Gothic and gay literature as well as pop culture.

An Alessandro Trasuntino harpsichord (1531) with a lid interior by Titian and Paris Bordone. It’s part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s ingenious “Musical Bodies,” which succeeds in marrying art history and The Met’s collections with pop culture where the new Costume Art galleries fail.

Is fashion art?

July 12, 2026

On May 4, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in Manhattan inaugurated its new Costume Art galleries in the space once occupied by The Met’s late, lamented book and gift shop. (The shop, relocating to the lower level, will open next summer.)

This tells you everything you need to know about American culture in the digital age: We are a visual society, and I don’t mean that in the sense of deconstructing a Van Gogh. I mean that in the sense of the iPhone, TikTok and Instagram, here’s an influencer with a fabulous piece of Moissanite jewelry; here’s a recipe for scrumptious blueberry muffins; here’s a dress that looks gold in one light and blue in another, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

The guided missile destroyer USS Porter in the Strait of Hormuz in May 2012. *Photograph by Alex R. Forster/U.S. Navy.*

What does the New York Knicks' victory tell us about the Iran War?

June 26, 2026

When I started this blog some 13 years ago, it was dedicated to the power dynamic in sports and culture to accompany my series of novels. But once President Donald J. Trump was elected in 2016, I began to write more about politics, which, the analytics suggest, has garnered me a larger audience.

Still, cultural writer that I’ve been for more than 46 years, I’ve never stopped writing about sports, which like politics, religion and the arts fall under the cultural umbrella. Indeed, sports — like the arts, my actual area of expertise — are often a metaphor for life, as we’ve seen in the strategic, come-from-behind New York Knickerbockers’ championship victory over the San Antonio Spurs, which not only captured the essence of workaday New York but said something profound about the nature of winning and losing and thus the Iran War.

Center Willis Reed, seen here in 1972, played on the championship New York Knicks teams of the 1970s.

Do sports unite or divide? Or both?

June 10, 2026

Recently, Pope Leo XIV spoke about sports as a unifying factor, teaching athletes teamwork and respect for other traditions.

But is that true? With the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup and the World Cup all in play, there has probably never been a bigger moment for nations to come together through sports. And yet if sports bring people together, teams and fans alike, they also divide.

The real story behind Trump's concert debacle

June 10, 2026

As with everything concerning President Donald J. Trump — including the boos that greeted him for Game Three of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan Monday night — much has been written about his on and off Freedom 250 concert series. It included an array of performers from country music’s Martina McBride to funk and soul’s The Commodores — until it didn’t.

Vittore Carpaccio’s “St. Augustine in His Study” (1502, tempera on canvas). The Doctor of the Church’s “just war theory” has been hotly discussed in last week’s face-off between President Donald J. Trump and Pope Leo XIV.

Trump versus Pope Leo — tales from the standoff

April 19, 2026

The world has been shocked, but I would venture hardly surprised, by the contretemps between the blustery American president and the steadfast American-born pope over Iran that absorbed much of last week. President Donald J. Trump, incensed over Pope Leo XIV’s antiwar stance, accused him of being weak on crime, terrible at foreign policy and ungrateful for his in effect making him pope. (Apparently, even Trump subscribes to the belief that an American pope serving as a counterweight to an American president was what the College of Cardinals had in mind when they elected Cardinal Robert Prevost pope.) For his part, Leo doubled down on his message of peace, grounded in the Gospels.

But this isn’t the whole story or the only one….