Society

After two deadly shootings in confrontations between Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the activists obstructing them, Minneapolis was starting to remind people of Kent State. By “people” we mean progressive baby boomers, inclined to make the Vietnam War the measure of all things. For them, the massacre of four student protesters by a nervous detachment of Ohio national guardsmen in 1970 alerted parents to the war’s inhumanity. It started the groundswell against Richard Nixon that would force him to exit the war three years later – and the White House the year after that. The analogy is a bad one. Trump’s position differs a lot from Nixon’s.

Democracy has not been kind to William Shakespeare. His works may be read and performed more widely than ever, but readers and audiences understand less and less of what they see. Egalitarianism encourages narcissism, and narcissism interprets all art as autobiography. Shakespeare could only write about his own life, and if, in fact, he wrote about royal courts and noblemen, then Shakespeare must not have been Shakespeare, the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon. He must have been Edward de Vere, the earl of Oxford, or somebody like that. He could not have possessed the intelligence and imagination to transcend his personal identity, for none of us can do that. It would be

“The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom,” espoused German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Having spent the past two weeks in the grip of both, after fracturing my femur so disastrously it necessitated a total hip replacement, I can confirm he’s correct. And given I did it tripping in a hotel restaurant, I would add “shame” to the list. The pain was excruciating; the shame even worse. (History will record that the Free Solo daredevil Alex Honnold successfully climbed the 508-meter Taipei 101 tower, without safety ropes, in the same week I failed to navigate a six-inch step.) But the boredom’s been stupefying. If I had a plan how

There are actors who dominate the movie screen, and actors who deepen it. There are stars who are “bankable” and have names above the titles, and there are artists who, almost invisibly, give a film its weight, its texture, its lasting emotional impact.  Catherine O’Hara, who has died at the age of 71, belongs emphatically to the second group. She was one of the rare performers whose presence elevated everything around her. She understood precisely how to serve the story, the tone and the ensemble. Over a career that spanned many decades, genres and registers, O’Hara enhanced every film she appeared in.  What made her exceptional was not merely that

When one of the 21st century’s most acclaimed music artists takes out a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal to apologize for his anti-Semitic behavior, deny that he is a Nazi and ask for understanding as he works on himself, what do we owe him? Mercy, punishment, or neither? In his letter, titled “To Those I’ve Hurt,” Kanye West, now legally known as “Ye,” writes that he is “not a Nazi or an anti-Semite” and that he “loves Jewish people.” He attributes his anti-Semitic remarks, offensive use of Nazi symbolism and erratic conduct to an undiagnosed frontal-lobe injury from a 2002 car accident and to bipolar type-1 disorder that

When Prince Harry left the witness box at the UK High Court this afternoon, it was observed that he was “visibly emotional.” The Duke of Sussex was there to give evidence in his group legal action against the Daily Mail publishers Associated Newspapers a day earlier than expected. There is inevitably a certain amount of personal toil involved in any high-profile legal case – where the stakes for whichever side wins are considerable, both financially and reputationally. But the Duke of Sussex’s emotive, even angry appearance in court today made it quite clear to any onlooker that his motives were deeply personal. It appears that victory for him would represent a spectacular