So I got Chappell Roan in front of me for the very first time when I decided to follow an impulse to check out the fashion getups at Sunday night’s Grammy Awards show. One never knows what might appear there as “clothes,” however scanty, billowing, or seemingly fitted for extraterrestrial giants they might be. Landing on the page, I beheld Ms. Roan’s utterly ridiculous looking “gown” (THIS IS THE GRAMMYS, after all!), which the “New York Times” described thusly: “Ms. Roan arrived in a burgundy, opaque chiffon cape, a custom design by Mugler, that perfectly matched the color of her…
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Like multi-millions of other Americans, I spent much of the weekend thinking about Alex Pretti. Combing through countless media reports, checking for up-to-the-minute alerts, trying, flailing, really, to write something coherent yesterday that would bring a modicum of ease and a shred of understanding to the awful scene of his murder. Abhorrent as it is, I kept cueing up the raw video footage and still photos, as if at some point I could finally come to some halfway sensible conclusion about how it all came to this. How it is that eight masked, heavily armed and armored agents of our…
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The most profound spiritual truths in the world can usually fit on a bumper sticker. That doesn’t mean they’re easy to put into practice, “Simple, not easy” being the profound truth of that matter! But in general, if we manage to faithfully follow a set of core maxims in our daily lives, we will very likely die happy and content in the knowledge we have fulfilled our most basic human obligation: to have lived a decent life. “Be kind,” “Love thy neighbor,” “Practice compassion,” “Show mercy,” “Express gratitude,” “Dare to hope,” “Spread joy,” “Tell the truth,” “Commit to something beyond…
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So Renee Good is dead, Venezuela is under American occupation for who knows how long, United States Coast Guard boats are seizing oil tankers flying Russian flags on international waters , and on Friday, the president of the United States told a meeting of skeptical oil and gas executives whom he’s trying to convince to return to Venezuela that he also covets ownership and occupation of Greenland. About which he mused, “I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”…
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From the final minutes of Friday night’s “Washington Week in Review” broadcast and podcast on PBS, with host Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of “The Atlantic” magazine, and Thomas Friedman, “New York Times” columnist for global affairs. Goldberg: “Do you think Trump would actually go to war with Venezuela in 2026?” Friedman: “I would rule out nothing, Jeff.” *** From Friedman’s column in the “Times” mere hours later, after United States forces had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a 2 a.m. raid and flown them to New York, where they will likely stand trial on “narco terrorism conspiracy”…
