When Donald Trump excused his lewd, explosive conversation with Billy Bush from 2005 as “locker room talk,” my ears pricked up and not just because the gender wars he’s engendered have been such excellent fodder for a blog titled “The Games Men Play.”
In my forthcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding” (Less Than Three Press, 2017), about a gay, biracial quarterback’s quest for identity, acceptance, success and love in the NFL, I have a couple of locker room moments in which women are discussed and even confronted in a less than respectful manner. ...
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Read MoreWell, this is a first – the F-word, the S-word, the T-word and the P-word in political coverage. It all comes courtesy of the latest Donald Trump revelations – that in a hot-mike conversation with Billy Bush in 2005, Trump admitted to groping women.
I have to admit that I’m inured to his shenanigans by now. There are so many of them that I’ve grown a thick skin. What disturbs me here is not Trump, a lost cause, or the predictable blaming of Bill and Hillary Clinton as philanderer and enabler but the idea that this is just boys-will-be-boys banter. ...
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Read MoreIt was a beautiful day: That’s what I remember thinking. And it’s probably the first thing anyone who is old enough to remember it will tell you about it.
Seamless sky, what pilots call severe clear. Had to be. The men who brought those buildings down didn’t know how to pilot a plane beyond flying straight, so conditions had to be optimal. The day before, Sept. 10, it had rained. The next was a different story.
It had started promisingly enough. I was working on a piece about the 75th anniversary of the Chrysler Building – the favorite landmark of New Yorkers – and had a 7:30 a.m. interview with William Ivey Long, costume designer for the Broadway hit “The Producers,” whose designs for the show included a gown inspired by the building’s diadem top. Long was a terrific interview but soon excused himself for what he said was a busy day. Delighted with his remarks, I wished him joy of it. ...
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Read MoreSo which is it? Were 12-time Olympic swimming champion Ryan Lochte and three fellow swimmers robbed at gunpoint as they returned to the Olympic Village during the Rio Games? Or did they invent the story to cover up a drunken night on the town? Or are Rio officials trying to cover up an unsavory aspect of these summer games, the lawlessness of the host city?
It’s hard to know in a twisting tale that now has a Brazilian judge now seeking to detain Lochte, who has already left the country, and James Feigen. Often, though, the truth in a mystery lies between two viewpoints. ...
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Read MoreIn the games men play, Donald Trump has consistently defined himself as a winner. It’s what suits him most to the presidency, he has said.
But what does it mean to be a winner? In the scriptural readings for Mass this past Sunday, both the Book of Ecclesiastes and Jesus warn against those who build up material wealth with either no concern for their spiritual development or the reality that someday what is yours now will belong to someone else.
Trump, of course, would not see himself in this admonition. He says he has sacrificed much, because he employs thousands upon thousands of people.
But can such a sacrifice be compared to that of Capt. Humayun Khan, the Muslim-American soldier who was killed on June 8, 2004 in the early days of the Iraq War protecting his unit from a suicide car bomber? ...
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Read MoreThe death of five police officers in Dallas – coming after the shootings in Baton Rouge and Minnesota – overwhelms. How to make sense of the incomprehensible? How to know what to do?
“That was horrible,” people said definitively over and over again in its wake. “People are tired of being lied to," my cousin told me by way of explanation.
But I don’t think this has anything to do with people’s disgust at being lied to unless they are fed up with the lies they tell themselves. ...
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Read MoreThe world is like a restaurant with a major conflict in the front of the house and a fire in the kitchen.
In the front of the house is Brexit – the tip of whose Titanic-smashing iceberg we’ve just experienced. In the kitchen, we have terrorism in Istanbul and Bangladesh and the shootings in Baton Rouge and Minnesota.
Brexit will have sweeping, long-term effects – not the least of which will be the continued rise of women to the heights of political power, probably the only good effect.
But the more immediate issue is the continued violence in this world. ...
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