AS BEFITS OUR FRACTURED TIMES - and especially during the seemingly endless Trumpathon that is the 2020 Republic National Convention - we can and should turn our critical attention to the dark arts of disinformation. And how to fight them.

WITH THE WHITE HOUSE ‘initiative’ for Mid-East peace now wholly failed (because wholly biased), the words ‘peace’ or even ‘accommodation’ now appear unspeakable in the Oval Office, in all matters foreign and domestic. The divisive viciousness of the Trump campaign is now set for the months until November.

A NATION - NO, A WORLD - INFLAMED over racial injustice … rampant disease wreaking worldwide havoc but provoking feckless denial and inaction from authorities … many populations’ livelihoods in ruins. At such a time, the transformed media ecosystem must assuredly take serious stock of its responsibilities.

A PRESIDENT CRAZILY at odds with medical science. A nation reeling from disease that rampages through its ranks. But the man at the top merely sows confusion, and vindictively punishes those who might contradict him.

TIME SPENT IN LOCK-DOWN, as now with our COVID19-imposed sentences of unending house-arrest, can be time well-spent in reflection … and even more in reading.

Not everybody will fulfill their long-avoided completion of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu or War and Peace, and I have for my part made a point of sinking into much lighter fare.

DISLOCATED TIMES LIKE THESE inevitably create scattered thoughts. My own directionless thinking has strayed, unsurprisingly, to Daniel Defoe’s compelling 200-pager: A Journal of the Plague Year.

It’s not what it might seem from its explanatory subtitle: Observations or Memorials of the most Remarkable OCCURENCES, Public as Private, which happened in LONDON during the Great Visitation.

THIS IS A FIRST for me as I pound my well-trodden media beat. I’ll confess I had never seen a Tibetan film until I saw the hauntingly resonant ‘Jinpa’. And now I want to see more – at least, if they’re made by director and novelist Pema Tseden. (He has directed five previous movies for us to choose from.)

MY DEAREST COMPANION said as we were leaving the stunning exhibit-hall: “It’s terrible that we never learn about this, while we’re told so much about ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.”

Chicago is offering a timely and trenchant dramatic experience – in a limited run, at the city’s Victory Gardens Theatre, and likely to travel soon to Washington DC and New York. It’s a remarkable one-woman-show profiling US House of Representatives’ Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The piece is titled, perhaps inevitably, but oh-so-appropriately: The Adult in the Room.

ON THIS FINAL DAY of the decade I’m responding to a repeated call from the insistent Jill Goodman. Jill, of course, is one of my interlocutors – along with Marshall Miles – in the weekly Public Radio version of this column, which has been airing consistently throughout that decade and longer. (Our first broadcast together was in fact way back in 2007.)

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.