Blog

Special counsel Jack Smith making a statement regarding the indictment of former President Donald J. Trump in the documents case on June 9. *Photograph courtesy the U.S. Department of Justice.*

The Trump indictments: The master spinner spun out

August 3, 2023

Recently, I went to see “Barbie,” a surprisingly touching film about what it means to be human, with a cousin who collects Barbies. Afterward, the conversation at dinner drifted as it invariably does these days to former President Donald J. Trump. I explained to my cousin that whatever you may think of Trump — and she’s a conservative with a higher opinion of him than I have as a moderate independent — you must acknowledge that he is great at creating a narrative and sticking to it. That’s real power — power that is now being seriously countered with his arraignment Thursday, Aug. 3, on charges of fraud, obstruction and violation of voting rights in a federal court in Washington, D.C.

J. Robert Oppenheimer speaking in Israel in 1966, the year before he died. *Photograph by* ***Boris Carmi*** /***Meitar Collection*** / ***National Library of Israel*** / ***The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection*** / ***CC BY 4.0***

'Oppenheimer' as a mirror for our partisan times

July 27, 2023

“Oppenheimer” is a magnificent film that paints J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atom bomb,” in a more sympathetic light than his detractors would like while nevertheless exploring the blindness behind his brilliance.

The remains of the day: J. Robert Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie Groves returned to the Trinity test site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for news crews in September 1945, two months after the July 16 detonation of the first atom bomb. *Courtesy U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.*

Blind ambition: The antiheroism of Robert Oppenheimer

July 20, 2023

Friday, July 21, marks the opening of two highly anticipated movies that have nothing to do with each other but have already been paired in the public consciousness, perhaps because they both ask us to consider what it means to be human in a world where people constantly grapple for power.

The two films — “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” — have already been conflated as “Barbenheimer” (is that like “Frankenstein”?), with movie buffs planning a five-hour double feature of “Oppenheimer’s” main course and “Barbie’s” dessert. (Well, why not? After all, Barbie and J. Robert Oppenheimer were both physicists.)

I’ll have more on Barbie,“Barbie” and the male gaze in a subsequent post. But for now I’d like to consider Oppenheimer (1904-67), the scientist who spearheaded the creation of the atom bomb and whose life, lived at the nexus of ambition and conscience, would be eclipsed by his failure to understand the power dynamic.

Center of attention: (From left foreground) French culture minister André Malraux, wife Marie-Madeleine and President John F. Kennedy have eyes only for Jacqueline B. Kennedy in her pink Oleg Cassini. Even today first ladies like Melania Trump and first lady wannabes like Casey DeSantis channel Jackie’s look. *Photograph courtesy the White House.*

Moving forward: the endurance of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

July 12, 2023

What would Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis make of J. Randy Taraborrelli’s “Jackie: Public, Private, Secret” (St. Martin’s Press, $35, 439 pages) — out Tuesday, July 18, 10 days before what would’ve been her 94th birthday?

A scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” —“Madeleine” at the Golden Gate Bridge, Fort Point, right before she jumps into San Francisco Bay.

'Vertigo' and the idea of the other

June 4, 2023

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film “Vertigo” has reached what The Washington Post called in its reappraisal ‘Medicare age,’which got me thinking about my favorite movie — one that regularly appears on lists for the greatest, or one of the greatest, films to date. But is it, as The Post suggests, a story for our #MeToo times or rather a more complex tale of the human desire to project onto others our own dreams, fears and desires?

John Hassall’s 1899 lithograph of John Martin-Harvey as Sydney Carton in “A Tale of Two Cities. *Courtesy the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon.*

The challenge in letting go

May 24, 2023

Last summer on a very bad day, I attended the funeral of an affable, older relative whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. Distracted by problems at work, I made a wrong turn and arrived just as the priest was finishing the Gospel that is usually read at funeral Masses. In it, Jesus says, “I am the Resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me. though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whoever so lives and believes in me shall never die” — complementary, mirror-image phrases, like so many throughout the New Testament, that Charles Dickens uses to brilliant effect in the denouement of his French Revolutionary novel of dissipation and redemption, “A Tale of Two Cities.”

The tombs of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at the Basilica of St. Denis, the royal necropolis. Note her anachronistic Empire-style dress. Louis appears as he did on his coronation day, while his wife wears a dress in the style of 1815, the year Louis XVIII, Lous XVI’s brother, had the late couple’s remains reburied in St. Denis. *Photograph by Calvin Kramer.*

King and Queen to pawn in a game of love and death

May 4, 2023

We’ve got our teacup all set for the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla on Saturday, May 6, but what we’ve really been obsessing about is a distant relative of the king’s by way of another Charles — Charles I of England.

He was a direct ancestor of Louis XVI of France, whose marriage to a certain notorious Austrian archduchess is the subject of the revisionist, feminist “Marie Antoinette,” finishing its first season on PBS Sunday, May 7. Quite the royal weekend.