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‘Panem et circenses’, said the Romans - ‘Bread and circuses’. 

 This maxim served the Romans well. In times of crisis and whenever they needed a distraction from military defeats or political infighting at the highest levels, they simply entertained the masses.

 Caroline Wazir wrote an article in The Atlantic in 2016, linking entertainment and the need for political validation in the Roman Empire.

 “The Exotic Animal Traffickers of Ancient Rome” is a good summation of how thousands of rare animals - at least rare for the Romans - were transported to Rome to be butchered at the Colosseum. 

 The practice was used in the early years of the Roman Empire to win approval for ambitious emperors and, during the age of decadence, to distract from the failures of struggling Caesars. 

 Ultimately, the entire exercise had little to do with entertainment for its sake and everything to do with distraction.

As I trek toward the Great Unknown, as life’s struggles seem to intensify, some odd questions keep recurring.

Art — what is it again? Why does it matter? How does it matter? What does it mean to be “good” at it?

That last question, in particular, can cut like barbed wire — especially if you’ve been swimming all your life in a sense of mediocrity, having learned that the Temple of Art is the home of the blessed elite. There’s Mona Lisa, then there are scribbles and doodles: baby stuff. End of discussion. Your grade is C-minus. Welcome to consumer culture.

So why do I care about art? Indeed, why now? As I grow older (by which I mean “old”), I refuse, refuse, refuse to retire: to quit writing, to quit believing I’m doing something that matters . . . to quit believing that humanity is collective and, at the deepest levels of our being, we all participate in this collective. This is what I call art, even though I don’t know what I mean by that. Or at least I don’t mean something that’s simple and certain, or even particularly serious — at least not in an academic sense. Serious can be fun.

Despite their complicated and often uneasy relationship, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant agree on one thing: Iran is behind Israel's security problem. 

Harold Pinter was a prolific playwright and screenwriter. I enjoyed the 1960s films he’d written the screenplays for, The Servant and Accident, which were directed by that refugee from the Hollywood Blacklist, Joseph Losey. After being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Pinter’s rather heroic, 2005 noble Nobel Lecture dared to challenge the prevailing pro-war propaganda, excoriating the Iraq War. Although he was too sick to travel to Scandinavia, the hospitalized 75-year-old British man of letters videotaped his 46-minute frontal assault on U.S. foreign policy that was screened at the Swedish Academy. (See: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2005/pinter/lecture/.) Pinter did the best thing one can do with status, using it as a platform to be a scourge of the status quo, an implacable enemy of social injustice.