Acyn Torabi @acyn posted “The Battle of Baggage Claim” after Trump conflated the Revolution with the jet age.
Unless you were visiting Pluto over the Fourth of July weekend, you were aware that not all the fireworks were on Macy’s barges in New York City’s East River or over cityscapes and village greens around the nation.
No, much of the rockets’ red glare and many of the bombs bursting in air came from the Twitterati reacting to President Donald J. Trump’s address at the Lincoln Memorial.
Read MoreEdward Moran’s “Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World” (1886), oil on canvas. The J. Clarence Davies Collection, Museum of the City of New York. Originally gifted to America by France as a symbol of the preservation of the Union, Lady Liberty has come to represent a light to the hopeful — and hopeless — immigrants of the world.
As America celebrates its 243rd birthday today, we are reminded that we are a nation of immigrants — and yet that nation and that notion are both under siege. Squalor at detention camps at the border. A Washington state judge subsequently ruling that asylum seekers can’t be kept in detention indefinitely — a Trumpian policy that has created the crisis. President Donald J. Trump — so good at the trappings of America’s birthday, with his tanks in Washington D.C. and his speech at the Lincoln Memorial — defiying the Supreme Court ruling that bars a citizenship question on the U.S. Census.
Read MoreThe dramatically lit Aphrodite of Knidos — with her baby, Eros, sleeping at her side — in “The Countless Aspects of Beauty” exhibit at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, a feast for the sense. Photograph by the author.
“We’re not interested in Alexander I.”
That’s what one of my colleagues said to me about Alexander the Great (who was Alexander III, but no matter).
I thought about this as I returned to Greece recently on another “Legacy of Alexander the Great” tour, this time with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Arrangements Abroad. I thought about this as we swept by plane from Thessaloniki — Greece’s second largest city, named for one of Alexander’s younger sisters — spitj to Athens, the capital, on a 12-day tour that included buscapades to many of the nation’s most important museums and archaeological sites.
Read MoreLanding on Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944. Photograph by Chief Photographer’s Mate Robert F. Sargent
In his essay “The Eighth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” Karl Marx quotes the Hegelian idea that “all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.
“He forgot to add the first time as tragedy,” Marx went on, “the second time as farce.”
On Thursday, the world marked the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy to liberate Europe of Nazi tyranny. The Allies have been marking it as shadows of themselves. During the American Revolution, the British invaded the colonies, bringing death and destruction. This week, we returned the favor. We sent them Trump.
Read MoreThe Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, alias the new Tappan Zee Bridge, was fast-tracked by the Obama Administration. Is infrastructure a bridge too far for Trump’s?
So we’ve finally heard from Robert Mueller about his investigation into Russkiegate and while we didn’t learn anything new, we did have the extraordinary experience of the special prosecutor emphasizing that while he couldn’t prove the Trump campaign was guilty of a crime, he still wasn’t exonerating the president from obstruction of justice.
Read MoreA Manchester Brexit protest ahead of Great Britain’s Conservative Party Conference Oct. 1, 2017, with a caricature of Prime Minister Theresa May clearly visible. The more she catered to the extremists in her party, the more unpopular she became with them and the opposition.
In Jenni Russell’s fine May 24 column for The New York Times, she compares soon-to-be former British Prime Minister Theresa May to the queen at the end of “Game of Thrones” — lost, abandoned, her realm destroyed. I gave up on the series after the first season, finding it misogynistic. Besides, who needs such popular fiction when we have history and current events themselves? After all, we must account God — or, for the atheistic crowd, life — as good a writer as George R.R. Martin, n’est-ce pas?
Read MoreJustify after winning the Preakness Stakes on his way to becoming the 13th Triple Crown winner. (That’s trainer Bob Baffert in the red tie.) With no Triple Crown on the line this season, the action remains centered on the fallout from Maximum Security’s disqualification at the Kentucky Derby. Photograph courtesy Maryland Governor’s Office.
April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot began his poem “The Waste Land.” But T.S. — we hesitate to be overly familiar and call him Tom — what about May?
Threats to and from Iran, the continuing abortion divide, tariff wars, the stock market bouncing around like a knuckleball again: The only thing that is certain these days is, of course, uncertainty, making us all uneasy.
In the past, culture — specifically, arts and entertainment and sports — has provided stability in a destabilized world. But the real world keeps intruding on these parallel worlds that are framed differently by time and space.
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