Maybe we should just skip to the end. Is that sacrilege? Is it too cynical by half? After all, this is the part where we’re supposed to be waiting for answers and pretending to believe justice might be done. But if you’ve seen a movie a hundred times, it is difficult not to mouth the […]

Something came awake in them. That has to be the explanation. As they cowered in closets, as they said goodbyes and waited, with gunfire echoing down the halls, to die, something inside stirred itself. And when they didn’t die, when these teenagers left the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland alive — something […]

And here we are again, back to the same question. What to do about Louis Farrakhan? The leader of the Nation of Islam has, for years, been a toxic fount of anti-Semitic and homophobic rhetoric. “These false Jews,” he preached in 2006, “promote the filth of Hollywood that is seeding the American people and the […]

I’m here to defend cultural appropriation. “Cross-cultural influence,” would be the less pejorative phrase. But the term above, with its connotations of grand-theft culture, is the one favored by some African-American activists who’ve had it up to here with nonblack performers borrowing the soul and style of Michael, Marvin and Prince. Singer Bruno Mars is […]

So what should we say to Robert Ussery? He’s an antagonist in a story of breathtaking emotional cruelty that unfolded Monday. It seems Pastor Frank Pomeroy was sitting in his car near his church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, just east of San Antonio, when, he says, a man and woman approached the building. He says […]