Left Jabs

       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 ...

       As Bleeding Minnesota continues to dominate both the news and our consciousness, there’s one episode that especially embodies the utter madness of the cultural spasm playing out in front of us. The January 18 th protest at the Cities Church in St. Paul has everything you’d want in a Trump-era legal crisis: institutional incompetence, political gaslighting, ostentatious cruelty, and bad faith everywhere you look. All the hits. Already, Pam Bondi is in way over her head, but that’s not stopping her. In her latest overreach, she arrested Don Lemon, last Friday, for his attendance as a journalist at that protest. If the stakes and the visibility weren’t already high enough, charging Lemon pushes them through the roof. I’m guessing Lemon planned for this. His brand has been more-or-less in limbo since his racially-tinged purge by CNN two years ago, and he knows that Trump, like dictators everywhere, lusts to see reporters stand trial. App...