The uses of enchantment: A garden ornament at Caramoor. Photograph by Georgette Gouveia.
What is a holiday if not the meaning we ascribe to it beyond beaches and barbecues, retail and relaxation?
The Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah marked the first official Juneteenth — and the opening of its acclaimed international summer music festival — with a concert of works by a composer, Duke Ellington, who understood emotionally and musically that we are one race, the human one.
Read MoreThe Ryanair Boeing 737 that was hijacked on May 23, seen in 2019 in Poland. Photograph by Andrzej Otrębski.
Though we should never court tragedy, we know our true selves really only in it. Catastrophe, adversity of any kind, reveals character. So what does the Belarusian hijacking of a Ryanair jet tell us about ourselves?
It tells us what we have known all along in our fractured age, what we have seen with the pandemic, which is that we can’t come together in a crisis, because we can’t think clearly about it.
Read MorePrince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (left), examines building models at the University of Salford in 1967. During a 70-year career as a working royal, he carried out more than 22,000 solo engagements in addition to being what Queen Elizabeth II called her “strength and stay.” Courtesy the University of Salford Press Office.
Among the photographs The New York Times used to commemorate Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh — who died on Friday, April 9, at Windsor Castle two months short of his 100th birthday and will be buried from there Saturday, April 17 — was a 2017 photo in which the natty duke faces the camera smiling amid a sea of red-garbed Canadian soldiers, who are virtually all facing right. It encapsulates Prince Philip, a part of and yet apart from the British monarchy, “the strength and stay” of Queen Elizabeth II (her words) through 73 years of marriage, the longest in British royal history, who served crown and country with a confounding mix of devotion, action, humility, crotchety humor and a patronizing snobbery that critics have called impolitic at best and prejudiced at worst.
Read MoreNancy Kwan on the set of “Flower Drum Song” (1961), in which her China doll character, showgirl Linda Low, sings “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” It’s hard to imagine the musical being revived today.
Pope Francis has blessed civil same-sex unions but says gays can’t be married in the church, because what they’re doing is a sin.
So gay people are good enough for the state but not good enough for the church. Good to know.
Whatever happened to religion’s famous “hate the sin but love the sinner”? That turns out to be an impossible needle to thread. For the sin is apparently inseparable from the sinner. Georgia’s Crapabble First Baptist Church has cut ties with Richard Aaron Long, who killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent., in the Atlanta massage parlor shootings because of what he described as a sexual addiction. (What is it with shooters and three names — Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth?) I make no excuses for this man, who belongs to the long list of the literature of rejection, filled with men, usually young and white, who have a sense of self-aggrandizement and a disproportionate rage at rejection or some other supposed grievance.
But perhaps if religion spent less time equating sexual pleasure with sin and guilt and more time concentrating on actual love for humanity, we would at least eliminate one motivating factor in Long’s hate crimes, for they are truly hate crimes in the deepest sense of the term — a hatred of self that he had to turn on others lest he implode.
Were his crimes, however, also racist?…
Read MoreThen Meghan Markle and Prince Harry attend church at Sandringham on Christmas Day, 2017. Photograph by Mark Jones.
Just how damaging was the interview Oprah Winfrey did with Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, on Sunday, March 7 on CBS? Put Prince Charles’ revelations about him never loving Diana, Princess of Wales, together with Diana’s “there were three in this marriage”, multiply it a gazillion times and you have an idea of the damage quotient not only for the royal family but for the Sussexes as well.
Read MoreMeghan, Duchess of Sussex, greeting well-wishers in Belfast in March 2018. It’s a striking photograph that shows the bridge that the duchess could’ve been within the royal family. Courtesy Northern Ireland Office.
It’s the interview many will be talking about whether you’re a royal watcher or not – Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s sit-down with Oprah Winfrey, which airs on CBS Sunday, March 7, from 8 to 10 p.m.
Already snippets of the interview have provoked a strong reaction, with monarchy loyalists decrying the Sussexes’ whining about being relieved of their royal duties and patronages and Sussex supporters lambasting the crown for shutting the pair out amid an atmosphere of stultifying tradition and corrosive racism. Not since the War of the Roses – or at the very least, the “War of the Waleses” between Prince Harry’s parents, Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales – has an English dynasty been so divided, you might say. But actually a better analogy is what one poster described as a Wimbledon final played not on grass but across the Atlantic.
Read MoreThe Senate Republicans — led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, he of the closed-mouth smile — could rid themselves of former President Donald J. Trump, at his second impeachment trial. They won’t do it. Photograph courtesy United States Senate.
Seven years ago when the Greenleaf Book Group was preparing to publish my novel “Water Music,” about the personal relationships and professional rivalries of four gay athletes, one of their estimable editors sent me a question that I think about to this day.
One of the story arcs that is ultimately woven into the other three concerns an Iraqi boy, Alí Iskandar, who is taken under the wing of an American contractor during the height of the Iraq War with the promise of mentorship in the United States. Instead the contractor abuses him, enabled by the man’s family. My editor wanted to know why the boy doesn’t at this point run away, call the police, try to get back to his family. By way of answer I told him the story of one of my boss’ West Highland terriers, all rescues. This particular little fellow was kept in a cage all his life. Often in the office, he sits under her desk or, in moments of high energy, retreats to a corner. Once in a space it is hard to coax him out of it. He’s free and yet he’s still in the cage of his mind.
I often think about this when I think about the Republicans. Of all the many questions raised by the last four years, few are more confounding than these two: Why has former President Donald J. Trump attracted such a cult following and why do the Republicans stick with him?
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