Smoking Guns: The Deafening Silence of the Assault Weapons Makers
When I hear about another military-style assault-weapon tragedy, I can’t help thinking about cigarettes. It’s faded a bit into history now, but it was roughly 20 years ago that the heads of seven major...
View ArticleWhat the Gay Rights Movement Should Learn from Martin Luther King, Jr.
I was recently in a discussion with a gay activist who was angry at my insistence that we treat our opposition with compassion. How, he wondered, could I expect our community to be kind to those who...
View ArticleBlack Gay Men Are Still Invisible
Whenever I read about this mythical place in which a person’s sexuality is no longer taboo, in the wake of a handful of states allowing marriage equality, I often think to check the balance of my...
View ArticleGrantland Transgender Scandal Signals Progress
There is a glass-half-full way to look at the conflagration sparked last week by the sports-culture website Grantland publishing a feature about a duplicitous golf club shiller in which the threat of...
View ArticleAmerican Eagle’s Anti-Photoshopping Campaign Is Insidious Stuff, Too
American Eagle has announced that, in an effort to present more realistic role models for teens, it will not be using Photoshop in its new lingerie campaign. Images will appear unretouched, with such...
View ArticleThe Mad Men Problem at Home
When President Obama addressed the gender-based wage gap during his State of the Union address last week, women cheered and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro even gave out high fives. Obama called on...
View ArticleDespite Philip Seymour Hoffman, There Is No Heroin Crisis
The death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has given rise to a massive outpouring of grief and sadness from his fans and admirers. It has also given rise to an equally massive outpouring of patently...
View ArticleMillennials in Love: Why They’re Not So Different From Their Parents After All
There’s nothing quite like a new generation setting out to breed. It’s an exercise in feverishness and fretfulness, in urgency and appetite, a sweet and simpleminded leave-taking of the senses in the...
View ArticleHallmark’s Problem With Gay Love
I stand at the racks in the local CVS inspecting the merchandise and pondering life’s little issues: Should we be mice this time? Or little bunnies? Gosh, the bunnies are awful cute – but, dang, the...
View ArticleWhy Marius the Giraffe Had to Become Lion Chow
A few years ago, I attended a biannual convention of zoo nutritionists in Oklahoma for the book I was writing. Hanging out one night at the hotel bar with a group from around the United States, we got...
View ArticleSelling Social Justice Short
This Super Bowl season we’ve learned that social justice is in fashion. It sells. It sells Coke, it sells cars, and it sells us short. So it begins, imagine it with me. The loud roar of the ocean,...
View Article‘Straight Talk’ the Princeton Mom Should Give to Young Men
Susan Patton, a Princeton mom who lit up the Internet last year with her unsolicited dating advice for college women, is back with a Wall Street Journal column that sounds an awful lot like what she...
View ArticleDon’t Tell Amy Chua: Mexicans Are the Most Successful Immigrants
The narrative of the American Dream is one of upward mobility, but there are some stories of mobility we prize above others. Who is more successful: a Mexican-American whose parents immigrated to the...
View ArticleHow an Insensitive Jerk Saved My Marriage
“Oh, you’re pregnant again!?” one of my wife’s colleagues (who does not work with her on a daily basis) asked. Upon seeing her reaction, he tried to backtrack. But the damage was done. Allie hid in her...
View ArticleSpike Lee’s Racism Isn’t Cute: ‘Motherf-cking Hipster’ Is the New ‘Honkey’
It’s interesting that the director of the richest oeuvre of black films in the history of the medium doesn’t understand what the Civil Rights revolution was for. In his expletive-laced comments about...
View ArticleI Was Raised on Spike Lee Joints, But He’s Doing More Harm Than Good
I have a theory about Spike’s race rant and it starts with the New York Knicks. I know it sounds outrageous but hear me out. After winning their division and making a promising playoff run last year,...
View ArticleA Jewish Girl’s Love Letter to Loehmann’s
Loehmann’s is closed. Last week, the famous discount designer clothing store, shuttered the last of its remaining 39 shops, including one in Los Angeles where I live and four in New York City, where it...
View ArticleThe Changing Face of Exonerations
The popular image of exonerations—fueled by any number of movies and TV criminal procedurals—is of a wrongly accused rapist set free after DNA testing reveals the real perpetrator. But as a new report...
View Article5 Things You Should Know About Working Dads
My wife and I both work, but since she is a musical theater actress, sometimes she has to work late, really late. On those days, we get my son up, fed, dressed and ready for school before we go to...
View ArticleThe Duke Porn Star Isn’t as Empowered as She Claims
If you haven’t heard, there’s a freshman at Duke University who moonlights as a porn star. During school breaks, Belle Knox (that’s her porn name — she’s still keeping her real name under wraps) flies...
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