Men like thinking about the Roman Empire. So, should Sir Ridley Scott have cast Denzel Washington as the bisexual bad guy in his new movie Gladiator II? Is it historically accurate to cast a black villain in the Roman Empire? Conversely, should New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art be hosting ...
This is the time when every pundit explains that Kamala Harris lost due to this thing he saw coming first. So, now’s my turn. Before explaining how I was right all along, let me admit: not that I predicted Trump’s victory. Nor did I forecast that Harris would win either. As usual, I didn’t ...
I almost never bother to try to forecast the outcome of an election. After all, we shall all know soon enough. High-tech California, for instance, should be done counting its votes by early December. So, rather than attempt to offer insights into the same thing everybody else is talking about, ...
Has 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola pulled off the artistic comeback of the century by liquidating half of his heirs’ expected inheritance in his wine business to film Megalopolis, a screenplay he’d been noodling with since the 1980s? Before answering that question, though, let’s set the ...
One of the funnier aspects of the articles denouncing my recently restored freedom to speak in public, such as The Atlantic’s and now The Guardian’s, is that they can’t think of any good reasons why I should ever have been censored from making public appearances by threats for the entire ...
We may never get to see the nine-hour documentary about Prince that Netflix has paid tens of millions for because the late musician’s estate has legally stymied its release. So, it’s fortunate that The New York Times Magazine has run an enormous article, “The Prince We Never Knew” by Sasha ...
Some rare good news out of San Francisco: Rookie wide receiver Ricky Pearsall of the NFL 49ers has already been released from the hospital after being shot through the torso during an attempted mugging on Saturday afternoon at Geary Street and Grant Avenue, a block from Union Square, the ...
While reading a new study by Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt, Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress After Slavery, about how it is better for African Americans today to be descended from ancestors who were freed before slavery and/or lived after the Civil War in the north or upper south rather than ...
During an unusual stretch in United States history in which many of the candidates for national office, such as Donald Trump, Tim Walz, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, and George W. Bush, have been teetotalers, Kamala Harris is restoring American political tradition by finding joy in the ...
Kamala Harris’ fabulous career has of course benefited extraordinarily from her being roughly one-quarter black, but few have offered much of an opinion on her being one-half Tamil Brahmin (besides her fellow South Asians, of course), other than it reduces her despised white component. And yet, ...
