The new documentary about Mister (Fred) Rogers, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, could not be more timely. Some of the seasoned professionals at the Directors Guild screening last night wept—with longing. Mister Rogers's message was simple: Be Kind. A Presbyterian minister, Fred Rogers never "preached." He just loved. He looked deeply into the eyes of children and said, "I like you just the way you are." He embodied the Golden Rule. He knew that at the core of every person is a small child who wants to be loved and valued as they are. He knew that human beings start in this world filled with a desire to be good.
It is no coincidence that director Morgan Neville received unprecedented support to get this movie into theaters as soon as was humanly possible. The message from everybody who helped—financially and otherwise—was "We need this movie!" And in fact the film ends on questions about what Fred Rogers would do right now, in our current political and cultural tumult. "I think he would try to make it bend," says his widow Joanne. I interpreted that to mean that rather than rail at the reprehensible behavior of President Trump et al., he would look this man deeply in the eyes and try to address the hiding child full of goodness inside. Read More
James Comey is a very good writer, storyteller, and teacher, so on a literary level (except for one odd plot order choice—the highly dramatic John Ashcroft hospital showdown between Comey and Bush representatives—which I suspect has to do with the need to insert a ton of detailed background information), this book works..JPG)
This book is staggeringly good. I was familiar with Steve Almond from his short stories, but this is straight journalism at its best (which he teaches at Harvard). (It is clear from Almond's thought processes and messages to students, presented in this volume, that he is a great teacher and seasoned journalist.)
The reason more than 80 percent of New York City dwellers voted against Donald Trump was because we knew him—his history of pathological lying, his grandiose credit-taking for things he had nothing to do with, his cheating almost everybody who worked for him, his serial misogyny and complete lack of scruples. Mayor Mike Bloomberg said it straight at the Democratic National Convention: "I'm a New Yorker and I know a con when I see one." For people who liked Trump, his charm had to do with the fact that he was an unapologetic con artist who laughed at his own antics (for an example of the old Trump charm and humor at his own expense, listen to the 
Timing is important. There is a time for rage and a time for laughter, and right now rage reigns—as it should. After centuries of suppression, critical mass has been reached, the #MeToo movement has exploded, and male bodies are flying. Time magazine has put it on its cover. It's about time!
What really happened? What always happens: Politics, like life, is not fair. Nobody tells the whole truth. Everybody thinks they're right and excoriates everybody who doesn't agree with them. And the best we can do with this mess is try to listen to everybody with an open mind, make the best choices we can—knowing that none of them are perfect, and when we are in peril, choose whatever compromise most assures life.
I've been waiting for this book—the words of highly trained mental health professionals who are brave enough to risk backlash from their own associations by putting the safety of all people ahead of their rules to say nothing about individuals they have not treated. In a meticulously written foreword, one of the authors makes the case that "duty to warn" people whose well-being is in danger trumps the "Goldwater Rule" about silence. (There is an entire section of chapters on the ethics of speaking out—far too much to reduce into a review byte.) We are all in danger from this individual we have installed in the highest office in the land, and I consider the 27 authors of this step-by-step analysis of Trump's severe psychological impairments to be whistle blowers. 
This is a wonderful nuanced book that resonates mightily with and informs what is going on today. Read it if you want to understand any kind of historical basis for what is now happening in the U.S. Read it if you love the minutia of history—every conversation ever recorded during the Lincoln period, every permutation and convolution of the Civil War, the complex emotional motivations behind the factions (a lot of people fought more for preservation of the union than out of any conviction about slavery)—or if you feel as if you need to learn U.S. history. This book has garnered enormous public attention as well as an award-winning movie based on it, so I am not going to write more commentary on what is in it. Instead, here are some opinions about the very important content that is missing.
Much as we like to fancy ourselves superior to sheep and cows, we really have a lot in common: we are a herd species. We have leaders and followers, and to spook us requires a well-placed surprise that the "influencer" members pick up, and ka-boom, stampede. To control us, merely convince the same influencers, and we follow en masse. It's the key to many things — for instance, politics. But first the entertainment. (To get a point across, I've noticed that good shepherds open with enticement.)
First some definitions:
Like many other people, I've been stymied by the fact that facts no longer seem to matter: you can have two photographs of crowds side by side, and someone can call the smaller gathering the larger one with impunity; you can claim to have done more than anybody in history and in fact have done next to nothing; there can exist historical footage quoting you as saying one thing . . . and then the opposite, and you can claim to believe whichever film is more convenient according to the moment. As a friend recently said, "What do you do when it's clearly raining outside and it's now perfectly acceptable to look at it and say, 'It's not raining'?"