Like a little kid who just won his first event, Novak Djokovic can’t contain his pride and joy in holding Olympic gold at last.

NBC, the Olympics and American exceptionalism

August 6, 2024

The Olympics were just getting underway July 27 when the American swim team was reminded of how Australian swimmer Cate Campbell reveled in her country having had more gold medals than the United States (13 to seven) at the 2023 World Swimming Championships.

There has long been an intense rivalry between the swim teams that has spilled over into trash talk, but Campbell really went off on the cowbells in the stands that support Americans in the pool and even the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” If nothing succeeds like success, nothing irks like it either.

While the National Anthem comment seems petty, Campbell may have a point when you consider NBC’s cheerleading coverage of the Paris Games as we roll through the second week of competition….

Vice President,and Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris at a San Francisco Pride event in 2019. *Photograph by* *Quinn Dombrowski* .

The month that was -- from the Democrats' gambit to the Paris Games

July 30, 2024

It figures that my birthday break would bring big news: There’s just something about the second half of July.

On July 21, President Joe Biden went George Washington on everyone and announced that he would put patriotism and party before personhood and renounce the nomination for a second term, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

Perhaps the most surprising thing in an announcement that was devoutly desired and yet still shocking was the way people rallied around Harris, who raised $200 million in her first week on the campaign trail.

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.

God directs Abram, renamed Abraham, to count all the stars for that is how numerous his descendants shall be. From a Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld woodcut for a “Bible in Pictures” (1860).

What's in a royal name? Plenty

June 17, 2021

It’s one of the few things you carry throughout your life that you don’t actually choose. I’m talking about a name, of course — although that may come as a surprise to Lady Gaga and other celebrities who are often better known by their stage names than their given ones.

It might certainly come as a surprise to the former Meghan Markle, whose actual name is Rachel Meghan Markle but who calls herself Meghan. There are two schools of thought about people who rename themselves: They are wildly independent. They are wildly insecure. I myself don’t care for my first or middle names, but I was named for my grandmothers, whose memories I care greatly about honoring. So I wear their names with pride. And when time came for my Confirmation, I chose another name that I liked better and have since added a fourth that is my favorite. You can understand why the Department of Motor Vehicles has a problem with me.

But back to Meghan, Duchess of Sussex — yet another name. She and her husband, Prince Harry, have chosen to name their newborn daughter after his grandmother and mother, Queen Elizabeth II and the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Fair enough. Lots of girls, especially first-born daughters, are named as I was after grandmothers or great-grandmothers. It was, however, how they chose to honor Prince Harry’s grandmother that has become the sticking point. Instead of naming their daughter Elizabeth Diana, they named her Lillbet Diana, after the queen’s childhood nickname.

As the story goes, the nickname was based on her own mispronunciation of her name when she was very young. It was then championed by her grandparents, King George V and Queen Mary,; her parents, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, known as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother; her sister, Princess Margaret; and her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Perhaps some of her contemporary cousins use it as well. Perhaps not. Needless to say, the principle people who called the queen “Lilibet” are, sadly, all gone.

So the question becomes why would you name your child after someone’s intimate nickname that has nothing to do with you?

Yo-Yo Ma is offering “Songs of Comfort,” like Johan Sebastian Bach’s Sarabande. Facebook/Yo-Yo Ma.

Of COVID and character

March 21, 2020

Well, where to begin? Should we begin at the beginning — with the overpopulation, poverty, lack of education, filth and communist secrecy that produces diseases like COVID-19 in China? I’m no fan of President Donald J. Trump, but I have no problem with him calling this the Chinese disease, particularly as Chinese President Xi Jinping thinks nothing of kicking American journalists out of China in a further attempt to mask the severity of the virus there and his own negligence in his delayed response and sharing of information. (If Xi is helping the world now with masks and respirators, as Christiane Amanpour of Amanpour & Co. keeps going on about, really, it’s the least he can do, given that his country created the crisis. Praising the Chinese for “helping” is like thanking an arsonist who burned your house down for offering you a place to live. I mean, honestly.

The gun control movement’s #MeToo moment

February 24, 2018

Just as The New York Times’ Harvey Weinstein series ignited #MeToo, so the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, has galvanized a movement – and a generation – against gun violence in a way that we thought the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting would but never did.

I know: We’ve been here before – too, too many times. But this time feels different as high school students have taken to the streets and to buses – latter-day Freedom Riders, Oprah Winfrey called them – to protest the absolute lunacy of children, and the rest of us, being held hostage by people who think their Second Amendment rights entitle them to assault weapons.

Why does their right to own guns that should only be in the hands of the professionals trump our peace of mind? ...

No end in sight for sexual harassment

November 30, 2017

In his Sunday New York Times’ piece “The Unexamined Male Libido,” writer Stephen Marche offers this revelatory thought: “Men arrive at this moment of reckoning (about sexual harassment) woefully unprepared. Most are shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience.”

Translation: Men live with women. Men sleep with women. Men father women’s children. But they don’t know them. ...