One of the many complexities that has come to light in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus that is the Trump White House is the supposed New Yorkification of Washington D.C. The two cities have always had an uneasy relationship ever since Alexander Hamilton, perhaps the ultimate New Yorker, and Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the ultimate non-New Yorker, struck a deal that would make Washington the political capital of the country and New York, the financial one.
Even today, this remains an unusual arrangement but one that has worked for the United States. As Ric Burns notes in his superb “New York: A Documentary Film," ...
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Read MoreIt’s interesting – and not entirely coincidental that Mika-gate exploded right at the end of Pride Month and in a summer that has seen the release of “Wonder Woman” and “The Beguiled,” a movie told from the female viewpoint. Culture continues to consider women even if President Donald J. Trump rarely does (though he did take a shine to blond Irish reporter Caitriona Perry.)
That he fails to take a shine to blond journalists who challenge him like Megan Kelly and Mika Brzezinski is more the material point. ...
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Read MoreTwo of the best Sunday afternoons I’ve spent recently found me taking a break from blogging and novel-writing to relish show jumping at Old Salem Farm in North Salem, N.Y. and polo at Connecticut’s Greenwich Polo Club. Both sports figure in the third planned novel in my series “The Games Men Play,” a tale of blood and bloodlines about rival horse families told in part from the viewpoint of a racehorse trying to become the first since Whirlaway to win the Triple Crown and the Travers at Saratoga. ...
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Read MoreThe recent removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans – which has hit a raw nerve in the South – says as much about our misconceptions about memorials and winning and losing as it does about racism’s bitter stranglehold on America.
Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, who appeared on PBS with historian Walter Isaacson to discuss what many blacks perceive to be symbols of lingering racism and some whites see as emblems of political correctness – is right to say that memorials are meant to honor their subjects. They do so not only in the display of what is often great art but in pride of place. ...
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Read MoreThe controversy over the faceoff between “Fearless Girl” and “Charging Bull” on Wall Street has raised all sorts of psychosexual and political implications.
Some have seen the 4-foot-girl – hands on hips, chest puffed like a sail heading into the wind – as a symbol of feminist ideals. Apparently, that’s what sponsor State Street Global Advisors, which wants to encourage more women in the boardroom, had in mind. ...
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Read MoreAs Lent ends and the Easter season begins today with Christians celebrating Jesus’ Resurrection, TV has once again presented its share of documentaries and films about Jesus’ Passion.
PBS’ “Last Days of Jesus” offers a detailed consideration of what it meant to die by crucifixion. I now no longer watch such scenes, just as I no longer watch horror movies. “Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows,” as President Bill Clinton put it at the Democratic National Convention this past summer, prefer to dwell on happier circumstances. Not that we eschew suffering. Indeed, the surest way to prolong suffering is the refusal to endure it. It’s just that we no longer feel the need to go out of our way to create or endure needless suffering. ...
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Read MoreIt is perhaps no small irony that the culture that gave us “nothing in excess; everything in moderation” also gave us a literary masterpiece whose first word is “rage.”
The ancient Greeks were a mass of contradictions. But then, human nature is a mass of contradictions and the Greeks were nothing if not masters of plumbing the human condition as seen in “A World of Emotions, Ancient Greece, 700 B.C.-200 A.D.,” on view at the Onassis Cultural Center New York through June 24. ...
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