The way the ball bounces: Novak Djokovic on his way to being the No.1-ranked men’s player in the world at Wimbledon in 2011. Still number one, Djokovic was bounced from the US Open last Sunday when he accidentally hit a lineswoman.

A Novak Djokovic kind of year

September 9, 2020

What kind of year has it been for you, for our global community? For many, it has been an “annus horribilis,” to borrow from what Queen Elizabeth II said of 1992. (Chuck and Di divorced. Windsor Castle burned. Your Majesty, we felt your pain.) People have lost loved ones, jobs, homes and their health to the coronavirus. Their loss and grief are incalculable, as are our feelings of inadequacy in trying to help them.

For others, it’s been “the best of times, the worst of times,” to quote another Briton, Charles Dickens. They have not lost their health, loved ones, jobs and homes. Instead they are working from and on their homes, using their extra time to acquire new skills, take up a language, a sport or an art, exercising and losing weight and generally getting their lives in order. They’ve made money in the market, as tech and pharma stocks help buoy the Dow, and have even earned honors. Or maybe they haven’t endured any losses but they’re struggling with a number of challenges, like the kids’ schooling.

In any event, it’s hard for them to take much pleasure and pride in their accomplishments and blessings with so much suffering around them — and with the occasional curve ball thrown their way. They’re having what we might call a Novak Djokovic kind of year.

Frederic Leighton’s “Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon” (1868-69), oil on canvas. Mourning and black become her.

Mourning in America: My big, fat (ancient)Greek tragedy

August 31, 2020

There they were, the first family of the United States, gussied up — with one tennis-ball green exception — in basic black, clashing with the red, white and blue backdrop and looking for all the world like a group ready for a New York cocktail party to which they’d never be invited. There’s a metaphor or two in there somewhere.

A poster to a New York Times article said they looked like a contemporary Addams Family, minus the kindness and the humor. Like Eugene O’Neill’s Electra (more on her in a bit), mourning becomes them.

When it started: Former Vice President Joe Biden kicking off his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination on May 18, 2019. Photograph by Michael Stokes.

Dems shine as Trump prepares 'festival of grievances'

August 23, 2020

Against all odds, the Dems, no longer in disarray, pulled off a terrific virtual convention with superb renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (The “No Longer Dixie” Chicks, those kids on opening night); star wattage (Julia Louis-Dreyfus! Eva Longoria! Tracee Ellis Ross! Kerry Washington!); powerful speeches, particularly from the megawatt Obamas; and a clever roll call of the states that was part Olympic Parade of the Nations and part infomercial. (My sister Gina gives a shout out to Rhode Island, our smallest state, for plugging its fishing industries. “Little Rhody” has become “the calamari comeback state.”)

The four nights belonged, however, to so-called ordinary people, who illustrated movingly the failures of the Trump Administration.

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry attend church at Sandringham on Christmas Day, 2017, six months before their May wedding.

Royal flush: When Harry met Meghan

August 19, 2020

The challenge of authorized biography is the balance between accessibility and objectivity. If your subject is still alive or has keepers of the flame like a relative or foundation, you want to be able to tap into that resource. At the same time, you do your subject and yourself no favor by kowtowing. Indeed you make a stronger case for the importance, charisma, strength, greatness and perhaps ultimate goodness of your subject by portraying him with warts and all.

Like Andrew Morton’s “Diana: Her True Story,” Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand’s “Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family” (Dey St./William Morrow, $27.99, 354 pages) — billed as “the definitive biography” — reads like an authorized one.

Déjà vu all over again: She was brilliant at the 2016 Democratic Convention (seen here), and Michelle Obama was brilliant in support of Joe Biden at the opening of the 2020 Democratic Convention Aug. 17. Photograph by Tim Pierce.

The rising: The Democratic Convention opens

August 17, 2020

It was a socko night for the Democrats as they opened a presidential convention like no other with a response like no other — cohesive, compassionate, commanding.

Sen. Kamala Harris, seen here in 2010 in her official portrait as California attorney general, will have to bring all her prosecutorial gifts to bear on the presidential campaign as Joe Biden’s running mate.

All the president's women

August 12, 2020

So Joe Biden has picked California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate and the plumbing of why he did so has commenced. Biden picked her because she possesses a prosecutorial mind and temperament — she couldn’t have done the jobs of San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general without them — which enables her to give and take a punch. This ability to serve and volley should also make her formidable in any vice presidential debate.. (See her questioning of now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Attorney General William Barr.)

My uncle, a conservative, likes to point out that a vice president isn’t a prosecutor. That may be, but this one may have to be.

Contrary to what the sign says, the lockdown didn’t kill this man’s business. Rather, fear and denial of the virus ravaged the American economy.

Adolescent America and fear itself

August 10, 2020

Given the highly individualistic nature of American society, the coronavirus was always going to be a lethal challenge here. But it didn’t have to be as devastating as it is.