Dateline: Siena, Italy: It lends distance to be spending the Fourth of July in another country. It’s a chance to proportionately celebrate much that is genuinely great about America (to adopt a sadly sullied phrase), but also to reflect on its failures.   It sharpens my critical faculties to be temporarily resident in a rightward-tending nation that only this week was making a nuisance of itself in the European Union to which it belongs (by blocking the confirmation of new, quite enlightened transnational leadership). And perhaps worse, it has even sought to imprison a maritime heroine for her ‘crime’ of saving asylum-seekers from drowning.

ALL-TOO-ACCUSTOMED to dangers of extinction? Well … we do know, many of us, about threatened species like Africa’s black rhinoceros, the querulous-looking California Condor (pictured left), the Humpy Salmon of the northern Pacific, the tiny but beautiful Bird’s-F­oot Violet of the east and the mid-west, or the oddly-textured Amanita mushrooms of Texas (below right). But what of human languages that are endangered, and more specifically their alphabets, which can be extraordinarily eloquent visually as well as verbally?

IT’S A CULTURAL FANFARE, and it certainly swells with capital-C ‘Culture’ – both highbrow and pop. New York City’s brand-new development, Hudson Yards, reportedly the most expensive private real estate development in American history (and “a billionaires’ fantasy city” according to critics) contains within it an ‘arts space’ with the disingenuous, plainspoken name: ‘The Shed’.

IT’S AN AUDACIOUS EFFORT, retelling on a Manhattan stage the story of Socrates’ trial and death.

That is the lofty aim of the simply-named Socrates, written by actor/writer/director Tim Blake Nelson and mounted by The Public Theater under the direction of Doug Hughes. (Opened Tuesday, April 16, 2019.)

THERE’S A GOOFINESS, delighting in its way, about Heidi Schreck. She greets us sweetly at the very beginning of her (almost) one-person production What the Constitution Means to Me, in an example of what we’ll later recognize as her self-diagnosed “psychotically polite” behavior – a result, she says, of being raised in the North-Western version of small-town America.   

Dateline: Austin, Texas – A BRAND-NEW MOVIE TAKES ON a beloved 52-year old classic. That notion was enough to pique my interest.

Dateline: Austin, Texas  – IT’S NOT TOO GREAT an exaggeration to say I was nearly trampled to death. My near-tramplers were the hordes desperate to see the newishly-elected US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (below right), making one of her appearances here at this year’s South By South West (SXSW) conference and festivals.

A REMARKABLE FILM – one that strikingly reconciles potentially warring interests – is now being showcased at a remarkable venue.

MANAGING PRESS RELATIONS in government these days means, horribile dictu, operating within the overall coarsening of our nation’s discourse – of which the President’s unending assaults on the country’s essential institutions are often the most salient examples.

SELF-HARMING has at times featured in popular culture, occasionally to some point, but too often as just a facile piece of personality-sketching. I’m thinking right now of Secretary, the 2002 movie that first introduced the ever-affecting Maggie Gyllenhaal to most of us.

THE MEDIA GO CRAZY over this kind of story. A farmer plowing his field unearths a vast, priceless store of ancient treasures.

It’s something of a trope – since it happens, well, if not all the time … then at least both rarely enough to be newsworthy and frequently enough to invoke a familiar, even folkloric format for the narrative.   

THERE JUST TWO KINDS of people who’ll be denied a life-beyond-death, we are told in the newly-opened Broadway staging of Jez Butterworth’s sinewy Northern Irish Troubles-based play The Ferryman.

DURING A MEDIA INTERVIEW it could come as a shock to hear a senior western government’s representative quoting – approvingly and with reverence – the declarations of “our community’s Caliph”. Surely not that Caliph, a hasty or ill-briefed journalist might think. Not the leader of that blood-drenched, self-styled ‘caliphate’ proclaimed by ISIS and now militarily beaten down. And of course it wasn’t.

AN IMPORTANT STORY UNFOLDED for three weeks recently, in at least eleven American states – but it gained little mainstream press coverage.

Admittedly, it wasn’t too easy for journalists to learn checkable facts about it.     

Prisoners incarcerated across the country went on strike … expressing their demands for improved living and working conditions.

I’VE BEEN HIT by an onslaught of “The Eights”. My local public radio station, WNYC has been reflecting on our so-called ‘culture wars’, tracing them decade by decade, through the prism specifically of events that occurred in years ending in 8.

“I’M SORRY. I JUST CAN’T. If I appear in public and say honestly what happened with me – who knows what the fall-out may be.” Such has been the anxious response I’ve gotten so many times when, as a journalist working largely in TV, I’ve requested an on-camera interview.

JUST NOW AND AGAIN, specialized journalism scores a bull’s-eye hit that the mainstream media can overlook – but certainly shouldn’t.

I want to commend some dogged reporting by Marisa Taylor of Kaiser Health News, who for the past year and more has been on the trail of an egregious case of illicit medical experimentation.

Dateline: Cahors, France – Arriving in France and sampling European media again has been a jolt for me, in part because of dates. It’s the week of World Refugee Day and also of Juneteenth, celebrating the day (June 19th, 1865) when slavery’s abolition-order eventually found its way to deep in America’s still obdurate slave-state of Texas.

‘ART FOR ART’S SAKE!’ is without doubt a slogan to conjure with. And sure enough, that irrepressible conjurer/playwright Tom Stoppard (left) twirls Théophile Gautier’s 19th-century notion – that art is defiantly non-utilitarian – around his bewitching wand again and again during the newest revival of his Travesties (back on Broadway since last week).

Dateline: London  –  IS IT A JOKE AIMED AT stereotypical Britishness? Well, it is a British play … and it is about the weather. Actor and now also playwright David Haig’s tautly-named “Pressure” does indeed concern itself with weather systems – and yes, a character does acknowledge at one point the old adage that the weather “is all we British ever talk about!”