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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.

Lost opportunity: Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, chats with children during a visit to ActionAid in South Africa in 2019. Judging from photographs like this, you’d have to conclude that she and Prince Harry could’ve been king and queen of the Coomonwealth. It wasn’t enough. Photograph courtesy eNCA.

Lost horizon: Netflix’s ‘Harry and Meghan’

December 16, 2022

In the trailer for “Harry and Meghan,” the new six-part Netflix series that dropped like an H bomb Thursday, Dec. 8, with the final three installments on Dec. 15, Prince Harry observes, “It’s really hard to look back on it now and go, “What on earth happened?”

Boy, ain’t that the truth.

Lady Susan Hussey, a godmother to Prince William and a lady in waiting to the late Queen Elizabeth II, found herself in the middle of a racial firestorm after she grilled Ngozi Fulani at a Buckingham Palace event to fight gender-based violence.

Royal pains in the Anglo-American alliance

December 1, 2022

The Prince and Princess of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are facing off with different awards in different East Coast cities featuring different members of the Kennedy clan…..In addition to dueling couples in rival cities with different branches of the Kennedy family, we get the contretemps over Lady Susan Hussey’s encounter with Ngozi Fulani at a Buckingham Palace event to fight against gender-based violence.

Who’s smiling now? The Republicans’ failure to seal the deal in the midterms has set up a showdown with a weaker former President Donald J. Trump and a surging Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, seen here with wives Melania and Casey respectively. *Courtesy the state of Florida.*

Trumped: Republicans' election repudiation

November 11, 2022

It was going to be a red wave, no, a bloodbath with all kinds of controversies, conspiracies and maybe even violence — the proverbial American carnage. Instead the midterm election of 2022, which should’ve seen the party out of favor (that would be the Republicans) make significant gains on the party in power (that would be the Democrats) was more birdbath than bloodbath, a fairly typical midterm with some election dysfunction, a nutjob or two, but mostly people quietly, boringly exercising their right to vote. We’ll take quiet and boring.

And while the Republicans may wrest control of the House of Representatives and the Senate from the Democrats — lots of races are still too close to call — the Republicans would have only a wafer-thin majority and no mandate, similar to the Democrats the past two years. The difference is this was the Republicans’ race to lose — and lose they did. Indeed if this were a tennis match, it would be like the Wimbledon darling failing to close out the fifth set despite two championship points. (Et tu, Roger Federer?)

Jacob Anderson speaking about “Game of Thrones” at the 2019 San Diego Comic Con International. *Photograph by Gage Skidmore.*

'Interview With the Vampire' and cultural appropriation

November 4, 2022

Some authors are proprietary about their characters; some readers even more so, which is partly why Stephen King’s novel “Misery” and the subsequent film were such successes.

When the casting for the 1994 film “Interview With the Vampire” was announced, author Anne Rice balked at the idea of Tom Cruise as the Vampire Lestat, the antihero of the novel who becomes the main character in the subsequent books in the “Vampire Chronicles” series.

When the AMC series “Interview With the Vampire” bowed Oct. 2, some fans balked at the casting of Jacob Anderson, a Black actor, as Louis, “Interview’s” main character, and the updating of the setting to the Black Storyville section of New Orleans in the 1910s, instead of an 18th-century Louisiana plantation. Louis, they argued, wasn’t Black but white. How could the series change the essence of the character? (We should note that Rice, who died in 2021, was slated to be a producer of the series.) I would argue the new series didn’t fundamentally change the character, but it’s complicated.

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.