If we are the world, as we say we are, how is it possible to have a foreign face in America?

Not all immigrants come by this question the hard way. If you come
from Northern Europe or Slavic Europe, you may grasp the question in your head but not your gut, because the chances are you look enough like our received idea of how Americans should look to duck the bite of the question. Unless of course you’re Jewish and your forebears haven’t mixed with Aryans enough, by force or choice, to give you that accepted, that approved look.

Things change, for better or worse. When I was a boy Rudolph Valentino’s foreign face had been romanticized into at least as much acceptance as pizza or kielbasa. But the stardom of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jennifer Lopez would have been harder to imagine. Harder still the stardom of Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry. (more…)

We live in a society that has reached an incredible consensus, in spite of all the red state-blue state talk: we agree that it’s something akin to a terror alert to talk straight. (more…)

The gray region between sexism and misogyny is a gloaming filled with turned around street signs and delusions. I ought to know because I’ve been wallowing in it. I wrote in this space that Senator Hillary Clinton was marching like the Energizer Bunny off a cliff. I faulted her for playing the race card. I called her Pillory Clinton for coarsening the level of discourse in her campaign against Barack Obama by talking about his problem with white male voters. (more…)

John McCain, who knows a thing or two about the Navy, thinks military recruits should be instructed in our foreign policy. But foreign policies fluctuate with our political EKG, while our national ideals, however soiled they may be by scare tactics, hold fast.

My most memorable experience in Navy boot camp in the early 1950s at Bainbridge, Maryland, was being shown the 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident, starring Henry Fonda. Each and every one of us knew the United States Navy wanted us to know that a man may be unjustly accused and lynched and that it was up to each of us to stand, like Henry Fonda, against the terroristic atmosphere in which men may be wrongly accused and even executed. (more…)

Sometimes I think the all news all day formula is traumatizing society. The news—if you can call that weird concoction of anchor bonhomie and drivel news—is surpassingly negative, and in the interest of ratings the media rarely lose an opportunity to exaggerate the negative side of the news. News or what passes for it is about bad behavior, disaster, crime, nasty mouths, lies, spin, malfeasance—and a little upbeat story here and there as condiment. (more…)

Sexism, racism, agism, smoothies, bumblers, swift-boaters, dreamers—all  flavors in the great American apple pie. As we learn to avoid trans fats so we learn, ever so slowly, to wean ourselves from misogyny, racism, agism and all those other nasties.

The late Democratic primary had plenty of misogyny and racism to go around. It arose among the pundits, the voters and the candidates. But there were triumphs. As Senator Hillary Clinton said in graciously conceding the fight to Senator Barack Obama, there are now eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling, and none of us will forget it. Bless you, Senator. (more…)

Do you remember The Gates (inset) in Central Park in 2005, that hydrology of orange banners installed by Christos and Jeanne-Claude? I don’t think anybody mentioned it at the time but it had a precedent among the Arabs. They used to hold great poetry competitions in which the poems were painted on vast banners. The banners were then carried onto fields, turning them into seas of calligraphy. (more…)

If you’d like to look at the changing face of news, consider your own Google home page. Savor its interactivity. You can organize your news, weather maps, solar systems, art exegesis, you name it, and the list of “gadgets” grows almost daily. You can design your own newspaper.

But it’s no longer a paper, it’s news from the ether, and it’s being updated and reedited around the clock. More than all the words about the demise of the newspaper, your home page can tell the story. You can do with your cursor what it costs a paper-and-ink newsroom big bucks to do. (more…)

(This is the latest transcript of Hot Copy my regular podcast for The Student Operated Press)

One of the reasons I cherish The New York Times is its institutional eye for the easy-to-overlook and profound. The March 27th front page features a story by Brian Stelter called Finding Political News Online, Young Viewers Pass It Along. It may prove to be the most significant story of the first fifty years of the century, and to its credit The Times put it on the front page.

The story is about the socialization of news and imagery, not in the political sense, but in the sense that sharing news and imagery has become part of the way we socialize with each other. We like a blog post, a news story, an essay, an image, a poem, a quotation, and next thing you know it’s whizzing around the world to friends and family. What we’re accustomed to calling news is becoming as personal and intimate as a jewel box or a pack of baseball cards. (more…)

Municipal web sites tend to be passive-aggressive. In the guise of presenting vital information their subliminal message seems to be, And don’t ever say we didn’t tell you anything.

Rather than contribute to government transparency they tend to forestall inquiry by purporting to tell you all you want to know about the government you happen to be paying for. This is a ruse to distract you from all they’re not telling you. (more…)