Taylor 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 MoreM. Elizabeth Magill resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania Dec. 8 after a disastrous performance at a Congressional hearing in which she failed to denounce anti-Semitism and the genocide of Jews in relation to protests on her campus. As of Dec. 10, this photograph of Magill, who had only been in the post a year and a half, was still up on the university’s website.
My maternal grandmother had a phrase we could apply to Claudine Gay and Sally Kornbluth, the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) respectively, and M. Elizabeth Magill, the now-resigned president of the University of Pennsylvania — “book-smart and life-dumb.”
Read MoreSome members of the San Francisco 49ers kneeling during "The Star-Spangled Banner" before a game against the Washington Redskins at FedEx Field in Landover, Maryland on Oct. 15, 2017. Photograph by Keith Allison.
Wildfires still burning out of control in California. Some border babies still not reunited with their parents. Markets reeling from Turkey’s plummeting economy, pushed further down by Trumpian tariffs.
But thank God President Donald J. Trumpet has made us safe from kneeling NFL players….
Read MoreOn Tuesday, the NFL owners and representative players will meet to discuss the National Anthem protest that has been a driving issue this season – this as protest initiator and former San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback Colin Kaepernick filed a grievance against the NFL, saying the 32 owners colluded to keep him out of the league because of his activism.
A bit of background: “The Star-Spangled Banner” has been played before NFL games since at least 2009 at the behest of the U.S. Department of Defense, ostensibly to bolster recruiting. The NFL rulebook says that teams must be suited up and on the field before the Anthem begins, standing facing the flag, with their helmets in their left hands and their right hands over their hearts. In the third preseason game of 2016, a reporter noted Kaepernick sitting through the Anthem to protest police brutality against people of color.
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A new development in the continuing saga that is the Trumping of some NFL players taking a knee during the National Anthem to protest police brutality against people of color: Vice President Mike Pence left the Indianapolis Colts-San Francisco 49ers game after several Niners – former teammates of protest initiator and onetime quarterback Colin Kaepernick – took a knee during the Anthem.
"I asked @VP Pence to leave stadium if any players kneeled, disrespecting our country. I am proud of him and @SecondLady Karen," Trump wrote on Twitter.
"I left today's Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem," Pence wrote on Twitter.
But he and @POTUS must’ve known that there would be kneeling players, particularly on the Niners – who, along with the rest of California, are to the resistance of @POTUS what Boston was to the American Revolution. ...
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For 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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When I heard former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young speak at his 2013 induction into the Greenwich High School Sports Hall of Fame – wittily, for 45 minutes, without notes – I thought, Here’s a real golden boy.
Brilliant, handsome, talented, rich, famous, with a stunning wife, four lovely kids and a varied professional life beyond the spiral as a lawyer, equity fund founder/manager and creator of the Forever Young Foundation. Check.
A child of East Coast privilege – grounded by a protective mother and a tough-minded father, who taught their children to make their own way in the world. Check.
An NFL and Super Bowl MVP and a pillar of the Mormon community, an all-American dream. Check, check and check.
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