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.

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.

Peter Paul Rubens’ “The Massacre of the Innocents” (1611 and 12), oil on oak panel. Art Gallery of Ontario.

A nation at the point of a gun

May 24, 2022

I was going to write something about Queen Elizabeth II coming into her own in old age and seniors in the workplace — and I will do that in the next post — but once again I had to interrupt the pleasures of a quintessential spring night (a cup of herbal infusion, my writing, my warm but not-too-warm floral bedding) to weigh in on another mass shooting in the United States. This one — in Uvalde, Texas, a small, working-class city on the Mexican-American border — took the lives of 19 second through fourth graders at Robb Elementary School and a teacher. (The gunman was reportedly killed by police officers.)

Second through fourth graders: Let that sink in. “There are no right words,” the N.B.A. team the San Antonio Spurs said in a statement. No, there are no words at all. How could there be? And yet we are going to hear a lot of words in the coming days, the same words that will result in no action — “thoughts and prayers,” “our hearts are broken,” “Second Amendment rights,” “filibusters” and the famous “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

Kaori Sakamoto, seen here at the 2018 Winter Olympics, was a surprising third place finisher after the women’s short program Tuesday, Feb. 15, in which embattled Kamila Valieva took first. Photograph by David W. Carmichael.

The Kamila chronicles continued

February 15, 2022

The Olympic doping saga continued Tuesday, Feb. 15, in Beijing as Kamila Valieva, who tested positive for the banned heart medication trimetazidine, was allowed to compete in the short program by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), pending a fuller investigation of the obvious. Despite finishing first in the short program, ahead of Russian Olympic Committee teammate Anna Shcherbakova and Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto, Valieva is in a lose-lose situation — sure to be asterisked if she wins and still facing possible disqualification.

Indeed, there are no winners among the skaters as no one will be awarded medals until the investigation is complete, and that could take months.

For others, however, there may be a “silver lining.”

Beijing National Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest, site of the Beijing Winter Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies, Feb. 4 and 20 respectively.. Photograph by Peter23.

To watch or not to watch the Beijing Games

February 2, 2022

The Beijing Winter Games officially launch Friday, Feb. 4, with the opening ceremonies airing on NBC, and for many of us it will be something of a guilty pleasure.

Climate change. Human rights abuses. Restrictions on freedom of expression. Covid outbreaks. Critics charge that the Chinese do not have a great track record here and that a full boycott, such as the one the U.S. instituted in 1980 against the Moscow Summer Games when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, would’ve hit them in their prestige and their wallet.

Edvard Munch’s “Vampire” (1895), oil on canvas. Munch Museum. Anne Rice’s romantic vampires and witches have resonated with late-20th and early-21st century readers and writers.

Interlude with the vampire -- Anne Rice (1941-2021)

December 13, 2021

It’s a cliché in publishing that writers who are popular aren’t good and vice versa. There’s a bit of sour grapes to that notion, as if it were a consolation for those acclaimed writers who’ve never found a wide audience.

Certainly, there were those critics who pooh-poohed Anne Rice — who died Saturday, Dec. 11, at age 80 of complications from a stroke . Her prose could be purple, while her plots at times alternated between the meandering and the static. But Rice, whose 30 novels embraced the sacred (Jesus) and the profane (an S and M Sleeping Beauty trilogy, an escapist “Exit to Eden”) would create one of the most seminal novels, “Interview With the Vampire,” and characters, Lestat de Lioncourt, in American literature. By her own standards, her best-selling books (more than 150 million copies sold) were great, because they resonated with the tectonic shifts in our perceptions of gender, sexuality and race in the second half of the 20th century.