One place where everything comes together
Reading Time: 3 minutes There is no excuse for Jussie Smollett’s behavior, if the current narrative is the truth. And yet, he is one person, albeit famous, but only one. I have often thought that we will truly have overcome when the mainstream opinion of the African American (gay, Latinx, Muslim…) community won’t have to rise and fall because of the behavior of a few, whether they be exemplary or heinous.
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Reading Time: 4 minutes Maybe the troglodytes who beat up Smollett believe the idea implicit in the MAGA slogan—that there was a time when all was well with the world, or at least, close to it. When, to quote “Those Were The Days,” the theme song from All in the Family, “girls were girls and men were men.” If so, Smollett is definitely anathema: an articulate, openly gay man of mixed Jewish and African-American heritage. Once and for all, guys, the genie is out of the bottle (and I do mean, out). It’s too late to turn back the clock. The Supreme Court just upheld the ban on transgender people serving in the military, however, my daughter’s generation is more comfortable with gender-fluidity than mine.
They are the future.
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Reading Time: 6 minutes What if there were a groundswell of not just women but men, all calling out the entitled mentality that normalizes the displays of dominance included in every assault? There are those who lament that every small physical gesture is scrutinized and labeled, these days. I think this is a small price to pay as we try to change a worldwide culture where rape is a weapon and a silent epidemic rages, in the form of the indelible, excruciating memories of the victims, without any real consequences for the vast majority of their tormentors.
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Reading Time: 3 minutes The Trump administration has just missed a deadline to reunite migrant children under the age of five with their parents. Watching those young people suffer while the president turned, and continues to turn, a blind eye and deaf ear perhaps gave the Thai story more resonance. We needed a happy ending for those young men, brown-skinned like the detained Central Americans, deprived of their parents for vastly different reasons, but still forced to face indescribable emotional and mental conditions without the loving care of the people to whom I presume they would turn for comfort.
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Reading Time: 4 minutes I don’t want Bourdain’s legacy to be mainly about the manner of his death, because his life was so significant. He taught us is not to gloss over our differences, but to celebrate them. To respect them. To explore them with authenticity and openhearted curiosity. His shows were, in his words, “stand-alone essays” in which food was an important factor, but not the only, or even the main, component. In an interview with Anderson Cooper, he said, “If you don’t accept the food, you’re rejecting the people,” adding that when you show appreciation for local cuisine, “people open up.”
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Reading Time: 7 minutes My son, Malcolm, was diagnosed with PDD-NOS when he was three. I remember learning, long before I gave motherhood even a glancing thought, that former CFL quarterback Doug Flutie had an autistic son, and wondering how he could possibly handle such a thing. Finding myself in the same position didn’t answer my question, since each autistic person is different. And yet, all parents of autistic children face the same choice: learn to raise your kid, or abdicate responsibility. The latter never crossed my mind.
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Reading Time: 5 minutes I’ve long had a contradictory relationship with the beauty industry. On one hand, I think physical beauty is meaningless, revealing nothing other than our genes, our talent with makeup, and/or the skill of our plastic surgeon. Having a fit body does require work, however, no amount of working out can give a person long legs. On the other hand, humans are hard-wired to respond to whatever beauty standard currently prevails (and beauty is cultural and dynamic, though the internet has made the standards more and more similar, if my brief exposure to last year’s Miss Universe pageant is any indication). But on yet another hand (work with me here), I can’t say I’m immune to such things, as a longtime admirer of the male form and subscriber to both Vogue and Elle. Which have excellent articles, but are mainly about pretty people in pretty clothes.
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