Opinion

Once upon a time in sports, coaches were the absolute monarchs of their teams, exerting total control over every aspect of their clubs while at the same time playing the role of benevolent dictators toward their players. While they sought to provide sage advice to their charges, they also ensured that those they were mentoring knew their places and would never deign to challenge them. When football, baseball, basketball, and hockey went from simply being organized pastimes and developed into multibillion-dollar industries, coaches realized they could no longer hold autocratic sway over players who were making more money than they were, and they adjusted their coaching styles accordingly.

If there’s anything Washingtonians love more than brunching and expanding the administrative state, it’s the giant pandas at the National Zoo. On Wednesday, Washington, D.C., dwellers watched with sadness as Tian Tian, Mei Xiang, and Xiao Qi Ji left the zoo via FedEx trucks and, with a police escort, traveled down I-66 to Dulles International Airport, from where they returned to China.

For many, sports represent a necessary respite from the adversities of life — even in periods of strife.

Sometimes, with the benefit of hindsight, we look back at famous and powerful men only to realize that we have done their dutiful wives a disservice. Take F. Scott Fitgerald and Zelda. She was far more interesting and insightful than her husband ever was. Her books and substantial influence on her husband resulted, nonetheless, in her being shoved into the background: the wife of. In 2023, she’d have been recognized for what she was, and her husband would’ve been the supporting act. In fact, it’s become almost the default assumption that behind every famous man is an overlooked woman who, if she were given a proper hearing, would be found to be special. When longtime bachelor George Clooney finally married hotshot human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin after decades in the dating game, the jokes about how she was the one settling poured in. But being a new cliche doesn’t make it any truer than being an old one, and it is important to remember that the wife in a couple is perfectly capable of being the less interesting, the less artistically honest — in one way or another, just the lesser one.

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The jokey headlines write themselves: “A Little More Light, Please,” “Stumbling in the Darkness,” and “All the Bad Television We Cannot Unsee.” I will refrain, with regret, from adding to the list and state merely that Netflix’s adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s 2014 novel is a clumsy squandering of serious promise. One more, you say? Oh, all right: “All the Potential We Cannot Realize.”

The San Francisco crash is yet another folly in the electric vehicle revolution.

The United States has rightly sent military forces to deter Iran from widening the Israel-Hamas war. Israel is a democratic ally facing enemies that seek to annihilate it. The Biden administration is right to defend Israel, and Congress should meet the call to provide Israel with the assistance it needs to win the war.

The Beatles may have topped the charts in six countries in 1964 with the hit song “Can’t Buy Me Love,” but as romantic as the sentiment might be, the scientific evidence shows that money often can buy someone love … as long as the person is a man.

Few American cartoonists are as adored as Bill Watterson, or as reluctant to embrace that adoration. In 1985, Watterson began publishing Calvin and Hobbes, his syndicated newspaper comic strip about a mischievous Midwestern 6-year-old and his best friend, who is either a talking tiger or a stuffed animal, depending on who does the looking. Watterson deftly and wittily captured the world from a child’s point of view: Calvin’s classroom daydreams become the episodic adventures of his alter egos, Spaceman Spiff and Tracer Bullet (themselves clever parodies of Flash Gordon- and Dick Tracy-style serials), while Calvin’s precocious interactions with, say, his father are opportunities for hilarious misinformation. (His father tells him that babies come from assembly kits at Sears but that Calvin was a “Blue-Light Special” at Kmart, “almost as good, and a lot cheaper.”)

Thirty American citizens were murdered when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on Oct. 7. At least 12 were kidnapped. Only two have been released. President Joe Biden has yet to demand publicly that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad release their American hostages. Nor has he described the consequences should these citizens be harmed. This makes the United States look weak.

In 2012, an Indiana man named Eric Hartsburg got a tattoo of Mitt Romney’s campaign logo on his face. That was weird at the time. Now, more than a decade removed from Romney’s turn as the Republican nominee for president, it seems completely unthinkable. Romney bore the standard of a party whose adherents have gone from inking their faces for him to turning their backs on him with surprising speed.

In 'The Hollow Crown,' a professor of strategy describes how Shakespeare weaves together the high and the low to show how power works.