Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Susannah and the Elders” (1610), oil on canvas. Collection of Schloss Weissenstein. The biblical theme of an assaulted woman and the men who both prey on and condemn her had special resonance for Gentileschi, herself a rape… — Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Susannah and the Elders” (1610), oil on canvas. Collection of Schloss Weissenstein. The biblical theme of an assaulted woman and the men who both prey on and condemn her had special resonance for Gentileschi, herself a rape victim who was tortured to ensure she was telling the truth.

Tara Reade and the passion of our perceptions

May 20, 2020

Context drives not only perception but the passion with which we hold that perception. Witness Tara Reade, who has accused presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden of sexual assault when she was an aide in his Senate office in 1993. In another time, Reade would be one more explosive chapter of the #MeToo movement. But as Eleanor Roosevelt might put it, this is no ordinary time.

Detail of Charles Le Brun’s “Battle of Arbela (Gaugamela)” (1689), oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre. It shows Alexander the Great leading the charge against Darius III in the battle that would cement his conquest of the Persian Empire.

'Meeting' the moment

May 19, 2020

In 334 B.C., Alexander the Great took an army of 35,000 – roughly the size of the New York City Police Department -- against a Persian army of a quarter of a million in a bold quest to conquer the Persian Empire. Three years later, on the eve of the decisive battle at Gaugamela in what is now northern Iraq, he told his troops that they had no need for long, inspirational speeches. Their bravery and deeds made them more than prepared. But he wanted them to know that they had something the enemy did not. They had him. He would have their backs by leading from the front. They would endure together. And together, they would be victorious.

Why care about Alexander and the Greeks? For that matter, why care about history? Because they tell us something essential about leadership — that to be a leader you have to communicate a clear goal, demonstrate what’s in it for others and lead from the front. Whatever you may think — or not — about Alexander, he led from the front. He was a leader. And leadership is a quality that is in short supply these days.

Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald J. Trump during Trump’s November 2017 trip to China. Some see America’s ratcheting up of tensions with the Chinese as Trump’s Saddam Hussein moment. Photograph by Shealah Craighead/White House.

Are China's virus labs Trump's WMD?

May 5, 2020

Perhaps the only thing hotter than the subject of the coronavirus at present is the discussion of China’s accountability as the country of its origin. President Donald J. Trump has been pressing the Chinese for greater transparency, arguing that if the country had not been so secretive, the virus might’ve been stopped in its tracks.

Trump himself has a lot of explaining to do about his own early praise of the Chinese response to the virus and his own lax reaction. But we mustn’t allow criticism of Trump’s behavior to obfuscate the Chinese role in the catastrophe, anymore than we can let Chinese culpability obscure the lack of Alexandrian leadership — leadership from the front — on the part of Trump and other world figures like Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, whose macho approach to the virus has decimated the indigenous people of the rainforest. If failure is always an orphan, as the proverb suggests, it certainly has many negligent step-parents.

Shining city on a hill: Leo von Klenze reimagines the Acropolis created under the leadership of the Athenian statesman Pericles in “The Acropolis at Athens” (1846), oil on canvas. Neue Pinakothek.

Is this the end of 'American exceptionalism'?

April 26, 2020

The Athenian statesman, general and orator Pericles is generally regarded as presiding over the Golden Age of Greece, when Athens was the first among equals of the Greek city-states — ruling the seas in a series of wars; bestowing democracy on freemen; encouraging the arts and literature; and building a series of public works projects that are still with us today in the remnants of the buildings of the Acropolis that include the Parthenon, temple of the city’s patroness, Athena, goddess of wisdom and war in a just cause.But after some 30 years it was all over in 629 B.C. when a plague — perhaps typhus — ripped through Athens, killing Pericles and several members of his family. It was the beginning of the end for Athens, too, which became involved in a long struggle with archrival Sparta.

People often ask me about my fascination with history and in particular the Greeks and Alexander the Great, the Greco-Macedonian conqueror who would come along 300 years later and avenge all the Greeks suffered at the hands of the Persians, their foreign rivals, including the burning of that Acropolis. Let’s be frank here, shall we? People find my fascination with history and the Greeks at best quaint and at worst out of touch. They don’t just ask me about it, they ridicule me about it.

Who’s laughing now?…

Charlton Heston’s Moses parts the Red Sea in “The Ten Commandments” (1956).

COVID and America's 'pharaoh'

April 15, 2020

“The Ten Commandments” (1956), a hokey Cecil B. DeMille film that used to be shown every year as a Passover-Easter observance, nonetheless contains a smart exchange between Prince Moses (Charlton Heston, all lock-jawed macho posturing) and the Pharaoh Sethi (Cedric Hardwick), whose son Rameses (Yul Brynner, all legs-planted macho posturing) is trying to drive a wedge between the two. Instigated by Rameses, Sethi wonders why Moses is wasting grain on the Hebrew slaves building his city of Goshen. Moses points out that well-fed slaves make many bricks; the poorly fed, few; and the dead, none.

I thought about this exchange as our American Pharaoh — no, not the racehorse but El Presidente Donald J. Trump — contemplates the reopening of America post-COVID-19.

The economics of illness

March 25, 2020

About the only thing keeping pace with the coronavirus in the United States is the argument raging over whether or not we’ve overreacted. The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has advanced an idea fostered by Dr. David L. Katz, the founding director of Yale University’s C.D.C.-funded Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and an expert in public health and preventive medicine, that would isolate the physically vulnerable while keeping the rest of the population in circulation, much as we do with the flu.

The New York Stock Exchange. The largest stock exchange in the world is being tested, along with world markets, as the coronavirus, and the initially tardy response to it, turn a medical crisis into an existential one.

New York in the time of corona

March 9, 2020

Not long after 9/11, I went to Manhattan to do a story on the Chrysler Building. There was a burning smell in the air and something else — the smell of fear, hurt, dread. But New Yorkers being New Yorkers, they did then what they always have done: They went about their business.

There was something of that in the air when I visited last Friday. Now as then, the city seemed quieter, less bustling. There was the same sense of uncertainty among waiters and clerks. And yet people remain grimly determined to carry on. Perhaps more than anywhere else, in New York you are what you do.