Seeing President Obama atop the Acropolis in Athens – talking about democracy then and now – made me yearn to get back to Greece in memory. On the fifth day of the Times Journeys’ “The Legacy of Alexander the Great” tour, we visited Philippi, which looms large in Greco-Roman history. The city was originally founded by Alexander the Great’s father, Philip II, hence the name, but it is perhaps most noteworthy for two different moments in history – the victory of Julius Caesar’s supporters Octavian and Mark Antony over his assassins Brutus and Cassius, and the imprisonment of St. Paul, who brought his nascent mission to the Gentiles there.
At the Archaeological Site of Philippi, we looked upon heights where the battle – a turning point as Rome pivoted from republic to empire – is said to have taken place. Fortunately, we didn’t climb them but instead wandered amid the later Roman ruins that included an amphitheater. There John, the thespian among us, amused the group by striking melodramatic poses. ...
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Read MoreIn his new book, “Shaken” (Waterbrook, 213 pages, $25), Tim Tebow considers the failure of his NFL career after his successful run with the Denver Broncos. He’s now trying to make it as a baseball player with the Arizona Fall League, where, once again, he’s been hailed for his good work ethic, leadership skills and clutch play but is still struggling to master the outfield. NFL legend and ESPN analyst Steve Young is among those pulling for him. But many who admire Tebow say he simply doesn’t have pro-quality aptitude.
He has, in other words, the temperament but not the talent. ...
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Read MoreI’m the same age as Gwen Ifill – the woman who made TV history with Judy Woodruff on “The PBS NewsHour” as the first female co-anchors of a network news broadcast and who died of endometrial cancer Monday in Washington D.C. – so I’m old enough to remember earlier iterations, “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” and “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.” Both were anchored by two white men. And though Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer were fine journalists in the Walter Cronkite tradition, theirs were the faces I had seen since childhood.
People will tell you that affirmative action is needless and that you should only look for role models within your immediate circle, but I have to tell you that seeing two women of my vintage, including one of color, on my TV each evening, doing excellent journalism, was a comfort and a source of pride to me, a fellow journalist. I felt I could be enlightened by them without their well-groomed presences taking pride of place. It was their well-groomed minds that inspired. ...
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Read MoreI’m still trying to wrap my mind – and, more difficultly, my heart – around the presidential election. You can talk about the failure of the Democrats to appeal to working-class voters; their reliance on the Barack Obama coalition (blacks, Latinos, women, millennials), which did not hold for the Dems – at least not in great enough numbers, and that includes you, Colin Kaepernick; a certitude, a smugness even, that wasn’t justified; the role of F.B.I. director James Comey in underscoring the tightening race in the last two weeks before the election; but at the end of the day, it was all about the zeitgeist.
Donald Trump was not merely the “change” candidate, again (Remember when Obama was the change candidate?); he was the regular-guy billionaire you could sit down and have a cheeseburger with, the one who understood America’s deeply ingrained nativist, isolationist, homogenous longings. This has always been – for all our forays into wars around the world – a determinedly inward-looking country. ...
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Read MoreFor me personally, I can say with Frank Sinatra, “It was a very good year.” I got to travel a great deal and I got a contract for my second novel, “The Penalty for Holding,” about a gay, biracial quarterback’s search for identity in the NFL. An excerpt from the book will be published in the Westchester Review, and an essay I wrote on love, sex and gender in the work of Colombian artist Federico Uribe will be part of a new monograph on him. For all this, I’m truly grateful.
I begin with an attitude of gratitude in this the month of Thanksgiving, because in other ways I’ve been disenchanted and disheartened as many of those I have loved have faltered. ...
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Read MoreToday I could be writing the latest installment in My Big Fat Greek Odyssey or about the particularly New York aspect of this presidential election. I could be considering Tim Tebow’s new book “Shaken,” and how he may not have necessarily heeded God’s word – something central to his life – in resisting the suggestion of becoming a halfback as his career as a quarterback fizzled, or contrasted him with bad boy tennis player Nick Kyrgios, who has the talent for his sport but, apparently, not the temperament.
All in good time, though, for nothing is more important right now than this historic – and historically ugly – presidential election and making a case for rationality to triumph over animalistic emotions. ...
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Read MoreFreud said there were no such things as accidents so it should come as no surprise that The New York Times would carry a front page story on women who decided against reconstruction after mastectomy – complete with fascinating photographs of their flat, scarred and, in many cases, beautifully tattooed chests – at a moment that The Frick Collection in Manhattan is exhibiting “Cagnacci’s ‘Repentant Magdalene’” (through Jan. 22).
As several Times posters noted, the newspaper would not be displaying those photos had the breast cancer survivors had one or both breasts. And that’s in part because of artists like Guido Cagnacci, the Italian Baroque master whose subjects included Cleopatra and who helped sexualize the female body and female breasts in particular. ...
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