John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia” (circa 1851, oil on canvas), for which the artist and poet Elizabeth Siddall posed, helped inspire Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia. Courtesy the Tate Britain.
Why does a billionaire feminist continue to write songs about being rescued from towers by men who “were just honing their powers”?
Read MoreTaylor Swift, seen here at “The Golden Globe Awards” last month, has become the subject of a conspiracy theory to get out the vote for President Joe Biden after boyfriend Travis Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs win a rigged Super Bowl LVIII Feb. 11. Photograph by iHeartRadioCA.
When my publisher asked me to write about what has made Taylor Swift a billionaire, I noted that she seemed, as a singer-songwriter who began her career in country and branched out to pop, to bridge the American cultural divide.
Silly me. I should’ve known that everything and everyone in this society at this time can be politicized and thus divisive.
Read MoreDiana, Princess of Wales in Russia in 1995. Photograph by Nick Parfjonov.
In “Spencer” — the third leg in a November Diana trilogy that includes Season Four of “The Crown,” now on DVD, and “Diana: The Musical,” now on Broadway — director Pablo Larrain does for the late Princess of Wales what he did for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in “Jackie” (2016) : He imagines a goddess at a tipping point.
Read MoreAmanda Hess’ Sunday New York Times Magazine piece about our ambivalence toward anti-aging is but the latest commentary about the disconnect between ourselves and our bodies, and by “ourselves” I mean women and their bodies. It is a disconnect that affects men as well – though not to the extent that it does women.
Hess describes how Allure magazine has declared war on “anti-aging,” featuring Helen Mirren on the cover, draped in a boy-toy – the same Helen Mirren who played Cleopatra, of whom Shakespeare wrote, “Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
And yet, Hess notes, the same issue of Allure carried an ad for the new L’Oréal Paris moisturizer, part of its Age Perfect brand (of which I’m a big fan), featuring – you guessed it, Helen Mirren. ...
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David Brooks – The New York Times’ columnist who never misses an opportunity to miss a point – wrote recently that the reason Hillary Clinton seems unlikable is that she has no hobbies.
Seriously. The column – which let Brooks in for no end of snark – had two flaws.
First, it presupposed that everyone needs a hobby, that being a workaholic is bad. Some people like to work and find the play in work, like the writer who’s a journalist but also a novelist. (That would be me.) Work isn’t stressful. People are stressful. ...
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Whenever I was asked about my “walls of inspiration” – which have followed me to each new job, albeit with a changing cast of characters – I always responded that they were a feminist gesture, that I would remove them the day Playboy magazine folded.
Well, Hell has frozen over and I’ll have to remove my men. (Yeah, right. More on that in a bit.) ...
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So NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell will hear Tom Brady’s appeal, despite a request from the NFL Players Association that he recuse himself.
“One of the primary responsibilities of the commissioner is to protect the integrity of the game and to do what’s right for the game of football,” Goodell said.
“That’s my job. We have a process that’s been negotiated with the union that’s been in place for decades. It’s something that we’ve had in place for a long time and we’re going to do it that way.”
What planet is he on? First, there’s the NFL’s constant misuse of the word “integrity.” It means “wholeness.” In Jungian psychology, the integrated self is the self that is all of a piece. Alistair Cooke, the late, longtime host of “Masterpiece Theatre,” once said of Marilyn Monroe that she was a person of integrity – a mess off and onscreen. Cruel but you get his point: “Integrity” doesn’t mean “honesty.” It means that you’d be the same way with the president of the United States that you are with your grocer. It’s a quality that the Dalai Lama and the pope are said to have. It’s not a quality that’s usually associated with football players. What a surprise. ...
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