The ultimate mind-over-matter guy — John Milton’s Satan in “Paradise Lost,” seen here in John Martin’s “Satan Presiding Over the Infernal Council” (1824), engraving. Victoria and Albert Museum/The Bridgeman Art Library.
I started out writing this post about President Donald J. Trump and taxes and then about Trump and the appalling debate and now about Trump having Covid-19. In the Trumpian universe, you really have to be blogging every minute. That’s how fast the news changes.
Read MorePresident Donald J. Trump is expected to name Amy Coney Barrett to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat today. Photograph by Rachel Malehorn.
A female relative of mine recently told be about a flurry of activity in her company that involved the possible election of a woman for the first time to a certain position. The problem was that some did not like this woman or think she was qualified.
Well, said I, just because someone shares your gender doesn’t mean you’re going to support her for a certain job. Which brings us, of course, to Amy Coney Barrett, the apparently wonderful, brilliantly successful jurist, teacher, Catholic, wife, mother of seven (including a special needs child) and soon-to-be “replacement” for the late, deeply lamented Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In this Barrett will be opposed by many women who believe she will threaten their right to choose and the Affordable Care Act. She will also be opposed by many men as well who see her as a possible rubber stamp for a Trumpian second term should the presidential election descend into a Bush v. Gore slugfest.
Read MoreRuth Bader Ginsburg in a 2016 portrait. Courtesy the Supreme Court of the United States.
When I was a student at Sarah Lawrence College in the 1970s — during a seminal wave of feminism — I took a course in the Women’s Studies department on gender and the law. Our textbook, “Sex-Based Discrimination,” was filled with absurd, horrifying stories of stewardesses — as they were called in those days — and the like, who were fired for being five pounds overweight, for not being “attractive” enough, for having babies — in other words, for being women. Two decades later as President Bill Clinton announced an appointee to the United States Supreme Court, I recalled the chief editor of that textbook — Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Read MoreThe way the ball bounces: Novak Djokovic on his way to being the No.1-ranked men’s player in the world at Wimbledon in 2011. Still number one, Djokovic was bounced from the US Open last Sunday when he accidentally hit a lineswoman.
What kind of year has it been for you, for our global community? For many, it has been an “annus horribilis,” to borrow from what Queen Elizabeth II said of 1992. (Chuck and Di divorced. Windsor Castle burned. Your Majesty, we felt your pain.) People have lost loved ones, jobs, homes and their health to the coronavirus. Their loss and grief are incalculable, as are our feelings of inadequacy in trying to help them.
For others, it’s been “the best of times, the worst of times,” to quote another Briton, Charles Dickens. They have not lost their health, loved ones, jobs and homes. Instead they are working from and on their homes, using their extra time to acquire new skills, take up a language, a sport or an art, exercising and losing weight and generally getting their lives in order. They’ve made money in the market, as tech and pharma stocks help buoy the Dow, and have even earned honors. Or maybe they haven’t endured any losses but they’re struggling with a number of challenges, like the kids’ schooling.
In any event, it’s hard for them to take much pleasure and pride in their accomplishments and blessings with so much suffering around them — and with the occasional curve ball thrown their way. They’re having what we might call a Novak Djokovic kind of year.
Read MoreFrederic Leighton’s “Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon” (1868-69), oil on canvas. Mourning and black become her.
There they were, the first family of the United States, gussied up — with one tennis-ball green exception — in basic black, clashing with the red, white and blue backdrop and looking for all the world like a group ready for a New York cocktail party to which they’d never be invited. There’s a metaphor or two in there somewhere.
A poster to a New York Times article said they looked like a contemporary Addams Family, minus the kindness and the humor. Like Eugene O’Neill’s Electra (more on her in a bit), mourning becomes them.
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Read MoreWhen it started: Former Vice President Joe Biden kicking off his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination on May 18, 2019. Photograph by Michael Stokes.
Against all odds, the Dems, no longer in disarray, pulled off a terrific virtual convention with superb renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (The “No Longer Dixie” Chicks, those kids on opening night); star wattage (Julia Louis-Dreyfus! Eva Longoria! Tracee Ellis Ross! Kerry Washington!); powerful speeches, particularly from the megawatt Obamas; and a clever roll call of the states that was part Olympic Parade of the Nations and part infomercial. (My sister Gina gives a shout out to Rhode Island, our smallest state, for plugging its fishing industries. “Little Rhody” has become “the calamari comeback state.”)
The four nights belonged, however, to so-called ordinary people, who illustrated movingly the failures of the Trump Administration.
Read MoreMeghan Markle and Prince Harry attend church at Sandringham on Christmas Day, 2017, six months before their May wedding.
The challenge of authorized biography is the balance between accessibility and objectivity. If your subject is still alive or has keepers of the flame like a relative or foundation, you want to be able to tap into that resource. At the same time, you do your subject and yourself no favor by kowtowing. Indeed you make a stronger case for the importance, charisma, strength, greatness and perhaps ultimate goodness of your subject by portraying him with warts and all.
Like Andrew Morton’s “Diana: Her True Story,” Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand’s “Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family” (Dey St./William Morrow, $27.99, 354 pages) — billed as “the definitive biography” — reads like an authorized one.
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