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First 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.*

Tribalism -- 'The Crown,' Claudine Gay and 'The Age of Innocence'

January 7, 2024

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.

M. 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.

Low tide for higher ed

December 10, 2023

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.”

Taylor Swift at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards. *Courtesy* *iHeartRadioCA*.

The Taylor Swifting of the world

December 2, 2023

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.

President Joe Biden, seen here at left with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Oct. 18, is pressing Netanyahu for a three-day pause to secure the release of hostages. *Courtesy the White House.*

Are Biden and Israel losing the war of words -- and images?

November 8, 2023

All life is narrative. Control the narrative, and you control public perception and opinion.

At the moment, Israel and President Joe Biden seem to be losing the narrative thread. I say “seem,” because I haven’t interviewed everyone in the world on this, of course. But based on what’s making news, former President Donald J. Trump and the Palestinians seem to be winning the battle for hearts and minds, in large part because the battle is being waged not primarily with words but with images.

Gordon Parks’ 1946 photograph “American Gothic: Portrait of Government Cleaning Woman Ella Watson” plays off of Grant Wood’s iconic painting of the same name, stating in no uncertain terms that Watson’s contribution to American society was no less important or dignified than Wood’s dour White farmer and his wife. *Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs.*

The paintbrush and the gun

October 28, 2023

Many years ago now, I interviewed Renaissance man Gordon Parks — photographer, composer, writer and film director (“Shaft”), a man whose photojournalism in the 1940s through ’70s captured both the civil rights movement and Hollywood.

Parks had grown up poor and Black in Kansas. I asked him what kept him from being embittered by poverty and racial prejudice. He said something that has stayed with me ever since and that I have thought about a lot in the past few weeks of war and other violence: “It’s easier to pick up a paintbrush than a gun.”

Allison Zuckerman’s “Woman at Her Toilette” (2017, acrylic and inkjet on canvas) is part of “Framing the Female Gaze: Women Artists and the New Historicism” (Tuesday, Oct. 10, through Jan. 20 at Lehman College Art Gallery). *Courtesy Lehman College Art Gallery.*

A gaze of their own: women rethinking art history

September 28, 2023

In the late-20th and early-21st centuries, an age of cultural appropriation that has seen minorities adapt and reinvent the masterpieces of Western civilization, women artists have reasserted the so-called “female gaze,” not only by creating wholly original works but by reclaiming the art historical canon, either interpolating themselves and women arts leaders into iterations of great paintings or imagining men from a woman’s perspective.

A new exhibit at the Lehman College Art Gallery explores this subject through the prism of 19th-century French art.

This stained-glass window in the chapel of the former Academy of Our Lady of Good Counsel complex in White Plains, N.Y., contains a portrait of foundress Mother Mary Veronica as St. Veronica, the woman who wiped Jesus’ face with her veil on his road to Calvary and received the imprint of that anguished face on the cloth in return. *Photograph by Georgette Gouveia.*

Reunion and remembrance: Good Counsel revisited

September 21, 2023

When Katharine Hepburn made her first and only appearance at the Academy Awards as a somewhat old lady on April 2, 1974, she said, “I’m the living proof that a person can wait 41 years to be unselfish.”

I, now also a somewhat old lady, beat the great Kate by nine years, waiting 50 to be unselfish enough to attend my high school reunion on the former grounds of the Academy of Our Lady of Good Counsel in White Plains, N.Y.. A former classmate and friend who was on the reunion committee told me she had made it her mission to get me there and, not wanting to disappoint, again, I hustled my considerable butt to meet her at the chapel for the Mass that would begin our journey into the past.