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Eugène Thirion’s “Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices” (1876, oil on canvas). Joan heeded the voices of St. Michael the Archangel, pictured with her here, St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Margaret to rally the French against the British during the Hundred Years’ War of the Late Middle Ages. Burned as a heretic in 1431, she was canonized in 1920 and is revered today by the French, the Roman Catholic Church and feminists alike as a woman who remained true to her beliefs.

Transcending in the new Trump era

November 10, 2024

I’ve been thinking a lot about transcendence in sports and politics — two fields in which the quantitative and the qualitative collide.

J.W. Waterhouse’s “Echo and Narcissus” (1903, oil on canvas). Courtesy Walker Art Gallery. Narcissus falls in love with his reflection not because he has an inflated sense of self but because he has no strong, healthy core identity. These days, he is too much with us.

The 2024 presidential election and the irrational cult of narcissism

October 31, 2024

These days, everyone is making closing arguments — Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald J. Trump, comedian Jimmy Kimmel of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” — as if we the people were we, the jury, which I suppose we are. I might as well make one as well.

A plaster cast of Eduardo Barrón's "Nero and Seneca" (1904). Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher and historian who tutored and advised the emperor Nero, had a lot to say about leading a meaningful life. His ended when the narcissistic Nero forced him to commit suicide. *Courtesy Museo del Prado.*

High profile leave-takings ask -- when and how to go?

October 13, 2024

Recently, The Museum of Modern Art director Glenn D. Lowry, a man I interviewed several times in my career as a cultural writer, announced that he will step down from his post after 30 years in September of 2025.

As much as his counterpart Philippe de Montebello at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who left that post in 2008 after more than 30 years as its longest-serving director, Lowry really shaped the New York City cultural scene at the twilight of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st. He could’ve stayed on.

But he told The New York Times: “I didn’t want to be the person who stayed too long.”

In that, however, Lowry is a rare bird.

Root, root, root for the visiting team -- and the American worker

September 1, 2024

A pre-Labor Day trip to see the good-but-not-great New York Yankees play the better-than-expected Nationals in Washington D.C. yielded some insights into the American worker, who these days always seems always to be on the visiting team — that is, in hostile territory.

Donald J. Trump and the nature of karma

July 14, 2024

Violence is never the answer, but it is often the question. The attempt on former President Donald J. Trump’s life is nothing to celebrate as the taking of a life in anything but self-defense is morally and legally wrong.

But after almost 10 years of vitriol on the campaign trail and in office, he has come to his encounter with karma.

Julius Kronberg’s “Hypatia” (1889), oil on canvas. The particularly brutal murder of this fifth-century Alexandrian philosopher and mathematician shocked even the Roman Empire. It’s recounted in Islam Issa’s new book “Alexandria: The City That Changed the World” (Pegasus Books, $35, 476 pages).

Humanity's continuing mean season

May 18, 2024

When I was thinking about what my next blog post should be, there was no lack of ideas. Should it be about the student protests, which, however sincere, lack historical perspective, or dog-, goat- and horse-shooting Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota or the Republicans’ “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” at former President Donald J. Trump’s trial in New York or the continuing wars in Ukraine and Gaza? Or how about Speaker-vacating Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene going after Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s eyelashes verbally, which led to Crockett’s sly rebuke “about somebody’s bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body”?

Then I had an unsettling personal experience that made me realize that what all these events and people have in common is further proof that despite the upward arc of civilization, we live in cruel world.

Karl von Piloty’s “The Murder of Caesar” (1865, oil on canvas)*.Courtesy Landesmuseum Hannover.* Both Dante and Shakespeare, who understood political instability, would tip the scales in favor of Caesar’s character against his assassins as would Shaw and the 1963 film “Cleopatra.” In reality, Caesar pitted the mob against the so-called elites and destroyed those he deemed “other,” paying the ultimate price.

American Caesar -- Trump and Rome's Republic

May 4, 2024

The tagline of the PBS series “Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator,” is “Nearly five centuries of ancient Roman democracy were overthrown in 16 years by one man.”

Will we even get to 250 on July 4, 2026? Here’s how Time magazine summarized two interviews with former President Donald J. Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants for a cover story.

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