How many is this now? I’ve lost track of the number of prominent men who’ve been accused of sexual harassment in the weeks since The New York Times outed movie producer Harvey Weinstein as an alleged serial offender. Lupita Nyong’o, Angelina Jolie and Ashley Judd are among the dozens of women he reportedly subjected to […]

You see an apple. But not just any apple. Perfect in color, perfect in shape and without blemish, this is the apple other apples dream of being. It is the acme of apples, the most apple-y apple you ever saw, and you’d never mistake it for something else. “This is an apple,” says a male […]

It “makes some people uncomfortable.” That was the explanation Kenny Holloway, a school board official in Biloxi, Mississippi, gave the Sun Herald newspaper last week, for the board’s decision to remove from its eighth-grade curriculum a Pulitzer Prize-winning American classic, Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” “There is some language in the book that makes […]

I’ve been struggling with this question for a month. It’s been that long since a Democratic state legislator rose during the Q&A after a speech and asked me a deceptively simple thing: What should Democrats do now? What should their message be? I had no idea how to answer that, nor even any confidence that […]

Yes, he’s childish and incompetent. Is that really news by now? But of course, it wasn’t that assessment of President Donald Trump that made jaws drop over the weekend so much as it was the person making it. Meaning Sen. Bob Corker, who unleashed an extraordinary barrage of contempt on Twitter and in a New […]

You could call it a moment of truth, except that what actually came out of that moment was a realization of how little truth now matters. This is back in 2010, after I recounted in this space an astonishing feat of World War I heroism — a small African-American soldier named Henry Johnson, wounded 21 […]

We were such idiots then. That realization is, if you are a guy, an unavoidable hazard of seeing the new movie, “Battle of the Sexes.” The film, in which Emma Stone and Steve Carell recreate the 1973 tennis face-off between “women’s libber” Billie Jean King and “male chauvinist pig” Bobby Riggs is, for those of […]

Dear black people: I guess we’ve messed up again. Seems like we’re never going to learn how to properly protest, no matter how hard conservatives try to teach us. When there was violence in the streets over unpunished police killings of African-American men, they said that was the wrong way to go about it. Most […]

“Was nothing real?” — Jim Carrey in “The Truman Show” Funny covers a multitude of sins. That has long been my go-to explanation of a dynamic unique to comedy. Meaning the fact that you are allowed to be crude and shocking, to transgress all kinds of isms, all bounds of propriety, if you can get […]