The Giulianis are getting a divorce and it’s starting to get ugly. For those who hated Rudolph Giuliani’s heavy-handed, albeit successful, management of New York City or can’t understand how “America’s mayor” — the man who guided the city during its worst day, 9/11 — wound up as President Donald J. Trump’s lawyer, the divorce news comes with a high degree of schadenfreude.
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Stupid acts, laws in Alabama
Alabama has indicted a woman in the death of her fetus after she started a fight with another woman, who then shot her. The shooter was not indicted.
If this all sounds nuts, it’s actually perfectly logical in a place whose laws value guns more than life and the life of the unborn over that of the mother.
Read MoreAgainst political correctness (with a caveat)
My cousin-hosts served up an intense political discussion along with delicious herb-crusted lamb chops for Easter dinner. As with most American families, mine is made up of Democrats and Republicans, Trumpettes and never-Trumpers. Me, I’m a moderate-independent, although I caucus with the Dems, so to speak.
About the only thing we all agree on is that we’re lifelong Yankee fans. So what did I, they wondered, think of the New York Yankees banning Kate Smith’s rendition of “God Bless America” because she sang a song about “darkies” that Paul Robeson, the great African-American actor-singer, also sang?
Read MorePawn to king in a real 'Game of Thrones'
“Game of Thrones” has returned, but I gave up on it after the first season. I found it sexist and misogynistic. If you’re going to show female nudity, then you have to show male nudity, as HBO did on “Rome.”
In any event, “GOT” had nothing on the Plantagenets, the Rolls-Royce of English royal families.
Read MoreSibling rivals in the court of Camelot
“How now , spirit? Whither wander you?” — Prospero to Ariel in William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”
There are few rivalries more intense than that of siblings, especially sisters, and few sisterly rivalries more pronounced than that of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her younger sister Lee Radziwill, who died Feb. 16 of natural causes at her Manhattan home. She was 85.
Read MoreTrump’s Manzanar
So, what are we now – Myanmar?
One of my sisters lives there, working for the U.S. State Department and spending all day every day on the Rohingya refugee crisis. These minority Muslims have been ethnically cleansed from the Buddhist country. More than 600,000 live in camps in neighboring Bangladesh.
I’m glad that America abroad is still standing up to human rights abuses, because America at home is busy creating them – setting up detention camps for the children of those trying to cross the southern border illegally for the sole purpose of deterring future crossings. …
Read MoreThe literature of rejection
I tend to use this headline to write about young men who have a disproportionate rage at the world and take it out on others as mass murderers, assassins, terrorists and serial killers. I’ve also written about a number of literary works that deal with such young men – Homer’s “The Iliad,” John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” among them.
But I think it is also an appropriate title for a post about the Lambda Literary Awards, which I attended Monday night at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts as a nominee. My book “The Penalty for Holding,” published by Less Than Three Press, the second novel in the series “The Games Men Play” was a finalist in the Best Bisexual Fiction category. (When I got the news, I had two thoughts: This must be an email for somebody else. And, were any of the characters in my book bisexual? It goes to show that the readers sometimes know more than the authors do.)
As I sat there, I had a feeling of disassociation. I didn’t know anyone …
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