Left Jabs

     I n 1974, Muhammed Ali and George Foreman went to Africa to fight for the heavyweight championship of the boxing world. Billed as the “Rumble in the Jungle,” this was widely regarded as a mismatch — Ali was past his prime, while Foreman, the current champ, was seen as a violent force of nature. Ali won, through sheer brilliance. He spent most of the fight with his back against the ropes, arms in front of his face, calmly deflecting anything Foreman threw at his arms or body. Foreman, known for putting away opponents with one punch, spent most of the fight having his blows harmlessly absorbed by Ali’s arms. When Ali was able, when he saw an opening, he “stung like a bee,” taking Foreman by surprise with quick shots to the face. But rather than “float like a butterfly” — his trademark dance-like style — Ali decided instead to stand still, conserve energy, take the abuse, and hit back when he could. Foreman was not ready for this. This was surely...

     It’s a given that Trump has no idea what he’s doing. But that hasn’t stopped him from launching a devastating attack on Iran which, looking back, was always going to happen. Not that there’s a rational reason for war with Iran, or for burning through a billion dollars a day, or for tanking the global economy, or for putting literally billions of lives at risk. He’s Trump, he doesn’t need a reason. But as much as Trump lies, when it comes to the big things — mass deportation, Venezuela, election denial — he generally means what he says, insane as that might be. Are you listening Cuba? Do you think he’s forgotten you Greenland? So when he started signalling that Iran was next on his bucket list, I suppose this day was always going to come. We knew there would be no real plan or objective, just the sick whims of a senile sociopath, drunk on power. Of course, Republicans have fallen all over themselves trying to stay ahead of the narrative du jo...

L et me say, right up front, that my knowledge of agriculture is minimal. Food grows in supermarkets. But I have done some homework to back up a suspicion of mine, which is that in terms of existential peril wrought by the Trump regime, there is no single group — with the glaring exception of our immigrant population — being bludgeoned as cruelly as the nation's farmers. Yes, there is deep irony in knowing that farmers voted overwhelmingly for Trump, many of them three times. Yes, it’s another FAFO moment — one of many coming fast and furious now. The problem is that we’re talking about our food supply here. We need those farmers — dumbshit Trump voters or not — to keep growing stuff for us to eat too much of. So it is of some concern to all of us that farm bankruptcies are up 36% since Trump took office. Underlying that figure is the grim fact that the market prices of virtually every major crop grown in this country are lower than the costs required to gr...

       In 2003, Barbra Streisand — an artist I have long admired — made a ridiculous mistake, one that has echoed through the years. Annoyed that her cliff-top mansion in Malibu had been photographed from the air, and that the resulting photo had been posted online, she decided her privacy had been invaded. So in a fit of pique that we mere mortals can never hope to comprehend, she sued the photographer for $50 million. Never mind that the photo was one of many in an arcane technical collection that was documenting the erosion of the Malibu cliffs. Never mind that if you look at that photo today you wonder how the mansion hasn’t collapsed into the Pacific by now. And never mind that the lawsuit was quickly thrown out of court by a judge who then dinged Streisand for $177,000 in attorney’s fees. Forget all that. What matters about this incident is that before she filed the lawsuit, the photo had been viewed exactly six times online. Once the l...

  My mother idolized Leon Botstein. She followed both his careers — as president of her beloved Bard College, and as the world-class conductor of the American Symphony. He has always been an impressive figure. I met him myself on two occasions. Once was at a Bard fund-raiser in Florida, where he was as attentive to my pre-teen sons as he was to my mother, whose annual donations were probably in the high two figures. The other time was at a talk he gave at the Romanian consulate in New York, on the subject of a rather obscure Romanian composer. He’s that kind of guy. So when Botstein’s name surfaced in the Epstein files, it got my attention. My first thought was that I was glad my mother didn’t live to see it. But then I thought about what her likely reaction might have been. Knowing Mom, I’m quite sure she would have defended him. She would have needed convincing beyond the collection of emails in the files, emails that are, in themselves, far from incrimi...

       We all know that Donald Trump lies with every breath, and that literally nothing he says can be trusted beyond the next sentence out of his mouth. Okay, we’re used to that. What we’re not used to, and need to be horrified by, is that the executive branch of the federal government is doing much the same thing. In matters affecting our health and welfare — literally our lives and deaths — all communication from our most vital agencies must now be assumed to contain MAGA propaganda. A culture of lies has taken over, and our own government cannot be trusted any further than we can trust Trump. Yes, there are many countries whose citizens have been through far worse, and for much longer than our single year in hell. They might be laughing at our panic, had not so many of them moved here to get away from the very thing they now see happening to their neighbors. But our homegrown, low-interest citizens have been a bit slow to see what’s going ...