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 MoreNikki Haley, seen on the campaign trail in Iowa, has vowed to fight on for the Republican presidential nomination, even after losing the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary to former President Donald J. Trump. Photograph by Gage Skidmore.
As I returned a purchase in a shopping center on a particularly cold Sunday, an extraordinary thing occurred: A flock of pigeons came running up to me in the parking lot as if it were 1964, I were the Beatles and they were a gaggle of teenage girls. One “fan” even aggressively perched on my car roof.
For a moment I was reminded of Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” but only for a moment. Extricating myself and securing the car, I returned the merchandise, wandering around the store a bit. Poor things, I thought of the birds. They were probably only looking for some crumbs. But with several eateries in the center, I was sure they wouldn’t go hungry.
When I returned to the parking lot, the birds were gathered around another car and driver, with a lot more of them perched on his roof. (Adulation is so fickle.) That’s when I realized in Sherlock Holmesian fashion that they were not looking just for food. They had figured out that each new car that arrived offered momentary warmth against a cold, mostly open space.
Nature is so smart. Human nature, not so much. Witness, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Exhibit A — the Republican caucuses and primaries.
Read MoreSecretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III’s private, now public, battle with prostate cancer raises some interesting questions about how we process disease — ours and others’.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III’s failure to disclose his hospitalization for complications from prostate cancer at a particularly sensitive moment when we are fighting proxy wars in Ukraine and the Middle East has raised the expected political hackles as well as some fascinating philosophical questions.
Read more…
Read MoreFirst Lady Barbara Bush and Diana, Princess of Wales, have tea in the White House’s Yellow Oval Room in October 1990 as Mrs. Bush presents the princess with a copy of "Millie's Book as Dictated to Barbara Bush,” chronicling the adventures of the Bush family’s English Springer Spaniel. Courtesy the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum.
In “The Age of Innocence,” novelist Edith Wharton’s 1920 Pulitzer Prize-winning “backward glance” at the Gilded Age New York of her childhood, lawyer Newland Archer is set to marry May Welland in a match of illustrious families. The couple’s prospective marital bliss is soon clouded, however, by the New York return of May’s cousin, the beautiful, independent-minded Countess Ellen Olenska, seeking to escape her unhappy union with a Polish count.
Newland is asked to dissuade Ellen from the scandal of divorce — in Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation, he’s asked to facilitate the divorce on her behalf — but instead falls in love with her and particularly her unconventionally view of society, both of which threaten its norms. What transpires are the efforts of everyone — the honorable Ellen; Mrs. Manson Mingott, the family’s redoutable matriarch; but especially May, who turns out to be less demure and more devious than expected — to ensure that Newland remains in the marriage’s, and society’s, folds.
I thought a lot about “The Age of Innocence” as I binge-watched the fifth season of “The Crown” — even as the sixth and final season concluded on Netflix — and read about the ouster of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University after her disastrously naive performance before a Congressional committee on anti-Semitism on college campuses in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.
Read MoreSandro Botticelli’s interpretation of the Nativity (1473-75, oil on canvas. Columbia Museum of Art.
Today — Monday, Dec. 25 — is, as virtually everyone knows, Christmas Day, an occasion that has not always been about “peace on earth, good will to men.” Perhaps it was always thus, but it has become particularly more so in our politically divisive times.
There are those who resent what they see as their holy day being coopted by the commercial holiday. And then there are those who don’t want secular culture subsumed by what is essentially a religious tradition. What both groups have in common is that they see Christmas as an either/or proposition. In reality, it has always been a mix of the sacred and profane, as it were.
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 MoreTaylor Swift at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards. Courtesy iHeartRadioCA.
When Peggy Noonan, who was one of President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters, writes in The Wall Street Journal, that Taylor Swift should be Time magazine’s Person of the Year, you know that Swift has captured the zeitgeist.
Read More
