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Where’s “Citizen Kane” director-star Orson Welles when you need him? The entrance gate to Xanadu, uh, Mar a Lago. Photograph by Thomas Wallace Scherzer.

The special master of his domain

August 24, 2022

This summer — like last summer and the one before it — seems to be another case of promise denied. Once again we started with high hopes or at least middling hopes. (Let’s face it: Since Covid, the bar has been set pretty low. And once again, it has not been cleared. We can each point to personal disappointments, which may or may not be of our own making. But as a society, we must consider a failure that stems from our own lack of rationality, imagination and compassion.

One example — the dominant story of the season — will suffice. No sooner did the FBI search former President Donald J. Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago for documents that belong to the National Archives than the Bureau was under attack.

Cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post bequeathed Mar-a-Lago to the National Park Service in 1973 in the hope it would become the Winter White House — which is what it did during President Donald J. Trump’s White House occupancy.

Trump's Toilet-Watergate

August 14, 2022

History, Karl Marx observed, repeats itself — first as tragedy, then as farce. So it was fitting that on the 48th anniversary of President Richard M. Nixon’s Watergate-spurred resignation, Aug. 8, the Department of Justice should search former President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, for his alleged failure to return documents belonging to the National Archives.

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.

Where it all began: Novak Djokovic becomes the No. 1-ranked male tennis player in the world in 2011, defeating Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the semifinals en route to the first of his seven Wimbledon titles. Photograph by Carine06.

The case for Novak Djokovic

July 19, 2022

I knew Novak Djokovic would win his seventh Wimbledon title. As a Djokovic fan, this one is all the sweeter given the strange, Nole year he’s having.

Cassidy Hutchinson testifying before the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attacks. *Courtesy the committee.*

Cassidy Hutchinson -- Ms. America

June 29, 2022

I always knew former President Donald J. Trump would be done in by a woman, but I never imagined it would be this woman and in this way.

I always thought the Trumpian comeuppance would come at the skillful hands of the estimable Stormy Daniels or the equally estimable House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, skilled in a different way but with the same results.

But there she is. No, not Miss America but Ms. America, Cassidy Hutchinson — earnest, principled, detail-minded, determined and crisply attired in summer-ready black and white, looking for all the world like something out of a John Grisham movie. (Back in the day, she would’ve been played by Julia Roberts. Today, she’d probably be played by Dakota Johnson.)

Lucas Cranach the Elder’s “Lady Justice” (1537), oil on panel. Collection of Fridart Stichting, a foundation in Amsterdam.

The end of Roe and of an era

June 26, 2022

It’s hard to know where to begin with the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade. The repercussions are that great.

For women who seek abortions, the 6-3 decision marks an eventual return to coat-hanger, knitting-needle days. If the pro-life crowd — which is generally pro-guns and pro-death penalty — thinks it has seen death, it’s hasn’t seen anything yet. Women have always sought abortions and will continue to do so, now less safely. But now death will come in other ways, too.

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