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A kindergarten in the village of Javolik, Serbia, built by the Novak Djokovic Foundation. Djokovic is active in social justice issues that might surprise the far right, which has adopted him in its anti-Covid vax mandate crusade. Photograph by
Ванилица.

Of Novak and no-vax

February 4, 2023

Among those exulting in Novak Djokovic’s Australian Open triumph Sunday, Jan. 29, were members of the far right, who had adopted the world’s No. 1 male tennis player as the poster boy for their anti-Covid vaccine mandate crusade after the debacle last year in which he was deported from Australia for coming to the tournament unvaccinated, a moment that covered neither Australia nor Djokovic in glory.

John Singleton Copley’s “John Quincy Adams” (1796(), oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The son of Founding Father John Adams, second president of the United States, John Quincy Adams would become the nation’s sixth president, serving, like his father, only one term. An esteemed diplomat and secretary of state, he had a long third act as a member of the House of Representatives, opposing slavery and proving that there’s life beyond being at the top of the power game.

Our failure to respond to 'the literature of rejection'

January 29, 2023

What do the Black cops who murdered Tyre Nichols have in common with the mass shooters in California — and indeed all the cops who murder and the mass killers?

They are all men with a disproportionate sense of entitlement and grievance and thus rage at some kind of rejection. They are part of what I call “the literature of rejection,” one with everyone from assassins like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald to dictators like Adolf Hitler to terrorists like Osama bin Laden to mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh. And they share a great deal as well with such fictional antiheroes as Achilles in Homer’s “The Iliad,” Iago in Shakespeare’s “Othello,” Lucifer in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’a “Wuthering Heights.”

What they all have in common is that they are men with an overweening, overwhelming pride that seeks the destruction of everything, and everyone, in its wake.

In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford presented the Congressional Medal of Honor to Rear Admiral James B. Stockdale for his leadership as a prisoner during the Vietnam War. Stockdale, whom I interviewed when he was a vice presidential candidate on Ross Perot’s 1992 independent ticket, said that the writings of Epictetus helped him get through his ordeal. U.S. Navy photograph by Dave Wilson.

A guide to living through the chaos

January 14, 2023

I no sooner arrived in Washington, D.C., for Christmas than the sister I was traveling with came down with Covid and the sister we were visiting developed a non-Covid virus. Other family members became sick as well. (Miracle of miracles, I never got Covid.) On my return, I had a sinus attack that has left me tired, which is why this New Year’s post is so tardy. Apologies, dear readers.

As I sat alone at breakfast in the hotel, shuttling between drop-offs for the Covid sister in the room next to mine and visits to the non-Covid sister, I had an opportunity to read a book that has had a profound effect on my life and that I believe can help you navigate the world as well.

Rishi Sunak giving his first speech as British prime minister on Oct. 25. *Photograph by Rory Arnold/No. 10 Downing Street.*

From Truss bust to dishy Rishi: Can Sunak save Britain?

October 26, 2022

When Princess Anne presented Daniel Craig with the Order of St. Michael and St. George — the same order his character, James Bond, is presented with — all I could think was that right now, we could use 007, Craig, the Princess Royal, St. Michael, St. George, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Henry V and anyone else who can lend a hand to right the RMS Titanic that is otherwise known as the United Kingdom.

Our crisis of critical thinking and leadership

October 6, 2022

In his perceptive eulogy for Queen Elizabeth II, Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, observed: “People of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders of loving service are still rarer.”

Ain’t that the truth. At the risk of sounding like the hammer always in search of a nail, I must nonetheless note once again that we are in an increasing crisis of leadership, from Vladimir Putin’s bungling attempts to conquer Ukraine, which would be laughable if they weren’t so horrific and dangerous, to the ham-fisted handling of Miami Dolphins’ quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s concussion. (The doctor/consultant who cleared him to play was fired. Really? The team’s front office and ownership should all be fired.

What does it mean to be a leader? it means you are a steward of everything and everyone in your care, a servant of others. It means you take responsibility, even when you are not directly involved in the action. Say what you want about QEII, put she saw herself as a steward, one who remained on the job till her dying day.

For most, however, it’s me, me, me all the time, and it doesn’t help that people don’t really understand this, because they have a limited understanding of culture.

A macaque at Ngarai Sianok, Bukittinggi, West Sumatra. Monkeypox is so-named because it was first isolated in monkeys. However, it comes from Western and Central African rodents, not monkeys. Photograph by Sakurai Midori

America's monkey(pox) business

July 28, 2022

I became a cultural writer in the age of AIDS,. And because my beat, the arts, intersected with the gay community, which was disproportionately affected by the disease in the United States, I was assigned by the newspaper I worked for then to help cover a subject few would touch with a 10-foot pole.

It’s hard to remember now more than 40 years ago as well as to overestimate the feeling of dread AIDS engendered. A wave of it came flooding back with Covid. And another wave of a different variety has come flooding back with monkeypox, wihich the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a global health emergency even as the Biden Administration weighs appointing a monkeypox coordinator.

The.Greek mythological figure Narcissus — seen here in a fresco in Pompei — gives his name to a quality and disorder that may be the defining attribute of the day. r

What are our pronouns? Try me, myself and I

July 21, 2022

You know how people ask what your pronouns are nowadays, or include them in email signatures, as a result of nonbinary and trans people who identify as “they” even though it’s a plural? Well, we don’t have to ask many people in the news what they’re pronouns are. Let’s just assume they’re the unholy trinity of me, myself and I.