Platner’s economic populism, including support for union workers, Medicare for all and an asset tax on billionaires, has lit a fire in Mainers young and old and led to a hasty departure from the race of the establishment candidate, 78 year old Governor Janet Mills, who has had a successful moderate record in the State House, but was perceived to represent the old guard in a party that is in dire need of a shakeup in its aging leadership.

Platner has ascended despite his heavy baggage, not least a Nazi-associated symbol tattooed on his chest and some intemperate social media remarks around race and sexual assault. He claims that the tattoo was the result of a drunken military lark and he had no awareness of its darker connotation. He has since had it covered with another tattoo. He has attributed the remarks to a dark period he suffered after four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and claims that they do not reflect his views today.

Many Mainers are fed up with Collins’ continued overall support for Trump’s agenda despite occasional votes against him when it is politically convenient and a measure is certain to pass without her vote. Many women are still incensed over her deciding vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court despite credible evidence of teenage sexual assault. She sounded uniquely stupid when he subsequently was in the majority to overturn Roe v. Wade saying he had “misled” her.

But Collins is a formidable survivor fortified by a Republican Senate Leadership Fund contribution of $42 million to her campaign. Six years ago, she surged past a strong opponent, Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, with her trademark refrain of “all she does for the state.” But that influence is waning, and she said she was “furious” over the Department of Defense recent order for a single Navy destroyer, rather than the usual two, to be built at Bath Iron Works, a significant Maine employer.

Republicans are building on Mills’ initial attacks on Platner concerning his troubled past, while also claiming that one semester at an elite boarding school and having a Dartmouth-educated lawyer as a father makes his claim to be a man of the people hypocritical despite that fact that he and his wife make a mere $60,000 a year, mostly from oystering, and that he depends on his $5,000 a month disability payments for his war-related injuries that include PTSD.

Platner’s support remains strong and almost every poll has him defeating Collins despite the negative details from his past. Some are holding their noses and will vote for him to get rid of Collins, but those who hear him in his public appearances are convinced that he is the real deal, genuinely interested in regular working people and their affordability crisis. They are voting for positive change.

The country may be tired of being conned by so-called Populism. They voted for a president who promised lower prices but led us into a war we cannot win and which has made life more expensive for everyone, while lining his family’s pockets at every opportunity and is obsessed with building a ballroom nobody wants for a billion dollars. Who, after years of unrelenting lies, finally told the truth when he admitted: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

Maybe it is time for someone who has to actually work for a living and actually cares about the vast majority who also do to represent us. Will it work? Who knows? It’s never been tried.

I certainly have no sympathy for Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi or, now Lori Chevez-DeRemer. Noem totally bungled the immigration enforcement debacle by overseeing a pattern of abject cruelty culminating in the murder of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis exercising their First Amendment rights while accusing them of being “domestic terrorists.” But she committed the ultimate mortal sin by shameless self-promotion, thereby violating the #1 Trump Rule: “Do Not Upstage Thy Boss.”

Bondi botched the Epstein files release but her biggest sin was her ultimate failure to totally subvert the oath she took as an attorney to bring unfounded charges against the president’s political enemies, as Trump demanded. Her defiant and embarrassing testimony in Congress, where she refused to apologize to the Epstein victims whose names were erroneously released didn’t help her standing with the president.

And Chevez-DeRemer, who didn’t do much in the way of furthering the president’s agenda as Secretary of Labor, was done in by an alleged affair with a member of her security detail, abuse of her official expenses for personal travel and drinking on the job (although her demand of a subordinate to bring a bottle of “josh Sauvi B” to her hotel room was hardly a testament to good taste). She also wasn’t helped by a husband who couldn’t keep his hands off her female staff.

Another woman who can be added to the list of Trump’ battered wives is Elise Stefanik, the formerly moderate Congresswoman who sold her soul to become “Super MAGA,” but was so put out by Trump’s broken promises to her, that she is quitting politics.

The Trump women who have avoided Trump’s wrath so far are Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, who has been relegated to irrelevance and become nothing more than a glorified gofer in his tiresome claim of election fraud, and Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education and former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, whose main role is the planned obsolescence of the department and who has a legitimate claim to being married to the world’s worst husband, Vince McMahon, the ex-WWE head, serial philanderer and possible rapist. Also among the survivors is Susie Wiles, the Chief of Staff, one of the few adults in the room, who seems to get the core of Trump and can somewhat control his worst tendencies.

The truth about Trump is that for all of his professed love of women, he eventually chews them up and spits them out. From ex-wives to female reporters to cabinet secretaries, they eventually outlive their usefulness to him. All except one, his beloved daughter Ivanka. The one he described to Howard Stern as “a piece of ass.” How’s that for respect?

But there is something altogether different in baseball this year. It is the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System where teams get two challenges per game to contest a home plate umpire’s ball or strike call. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, the long anticipated debut of Robo-Ump is upon us. Although ABS has been used on a trial basis for several years in the minor leagues, we will now get to witness it first hand in The Show.

Call me a krank if you like, but I viscerally hate almost all aspects of the use of instant replay in reviewing calls in sports. I can buy it in its simplest form: did the ball or puck go over the goal line or not? Was it fair or foul? Did the serve go in or out? But subjecting virtually every call in every sport to a ten minute interlude requiring three or four officials to don headsets, dip their heads under a curtain while studying the replay, confer among themselves and subject themselves to utter humiliation by proclaiming to the world that they got it wrong is just one more step towards removing humanity from the face of the Earth.

The most ludicrous use of replay has to be when soccer refs must decide whether a foul has actually occurred “inside the box,” warranting the awarding of a penalty kick, or if the ostensibly offended player has “taken a dive,” an art form that combines the balletic grace of Baryshknikov with the dramatic skills of Bernhardt. Even the best replay requires the ref to possess the wisdom of Solomon and the eyes of an eagle in making such a call.

Supporters of using instant replay to review plays may justifiably point to two events that occurred on the highest stages of sport. The best available technology cannot confirm that Geoff Hurst’s critical goal in the 1966 World Cup final between England and West Germany definitively crossed the goal line but most think it never did. But replays clearly demonstrate that Derek Jeter’s “home run” in a playoff series against the Baltimore Orioles in 1996 was snagged in front of the fence by 12 year old Jeffrey Meier of Old Tappan, NJ. Both calls had huge impacts on the results of those games.

But, so what? Games are played by humans who make mistakes.Why are we intolerant of the errors of all-too-human umpires and referees? Disallowance of Hurst’s goal might have robbed England of its greatest sporting triumph (and deprived that once great country of contrasting that moment of glory to the misery of its subsequent utter failures on soccer’s greatest stage). And, while it is likely that the Yankees would have found other magic to defeat the O’s in that series, the Meier snag allows us to prolong the myth of the “Ghosts of Yankee Stadium,” who seem to magically favor the home team in mysterious ways at key moments in their legendary history. (Red Sox fans are free to disagree).

Both the Hurst goal and the Meier catch contribute to sports lore. Rightly or wrongly called, they are part of sports history. A history that is based upon the exploits (and errors) of humans. I doubt that a replay technician will ever make any sport’s Hall of Fame.

Will the rise of Artificial Intelligence result in the greatest advancement in human development since the invention of the wheel, increasing productivity to the extent that we can spend all of our time playing golf or pondering the beauty of Shakespeare’s sonnets or will it wipe us all off the planet? That is well beyond my pay grade. But, when it comes to Robo-Ump, count me out. While it may bring the fairness of the game closer to perfection, it will deprive the fans of their greatest privilege when watching baseball: the right to cry “Kill the Umpire.”

Not since Freedonia and Sylvania went to war in the Marx Brothers 1933 classic comedy Duck Soup has the justification for attacking a country been so poorly devised. As the current conflagration demonstrates, the U.S. assault on Iran may actually top that movie’s idiocy. All it took was an insult to ignite Groucho’s President Rufus T. Firefly’s belligerent tendencies. Admittedly our current Fearless Leader needed much more, but, given his varying explanations for the reasons for attacking Iran and the muddled and ever-changing explanations of our end goals, we would welcome Firefly’s leadership over that exhibited by the extant Administration.

How’s the attack working out? So far, the most notable achievements seem to be the killing of most of the top tier of the theocratic government that resulted in the replacement of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by his equally hard line son, Mojtataba Khamenei, the rising oil prices caused by Iranian threats in the primary shipping lane, the Strait of Hormuz, and the accidental bombing of a school resulting in 175 deaths, mostly children.

Surely no one misses the vicious tyrant Ali Khamenei, and the threat of an Iran with a nuclear weapon has kept the entire Middle East awake at night for years. But even Trump admitted that “most of the people we had in mind are dead,” and the hope for a magical uprising to install a democratically elected leader was always a pipedream. And if, as Trump claims, Iran’s nuclear weapon program was “obliterated” in the 12 day Israeli led-war of last June, either he was lying then or one major rationale for the attacks must surely be redundant.

The U.S. and Israel clearly share a common purpose in trying to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, but which country is really driving the current conflagration is subject to debate. Even the major players are confused. But the goals of the two countries are not totally in sync and the always impulsive Trump is likely to cut and run, while predictably declaring victory, as soon as the markets turn south and Americans start to feel the gas price squeeze on their summer vacations.

One thing that is clear is that Chico’s character, Chicolini, in Duck Soup, would make a more competent Secretary of War than Pete Hegseth, but the comparisons are uncanny. As Firefly says, “Chicolini here may talk like an idiot and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you, he really is an idiot.” But this is not a farce and Hegseth’s bellicose rhetoric and apparent delight in maiming and killing the enemy resurrects the questions on his moral character that nearly did in his controversial nomination.

Trump’s one campaign promise that actually made sense was the end to “endless wars.” The current Iran campaign seems to break that pledge and has already alienated some of his MAGA base. But “endless” is a relative term and the projected five weeks for the duration of the war (which may be endless in the mind of the hopelessly impatient Trump) may allow him to mimic George W. Bush in his premature “Mission Accomplished” declaration.

Trump’s domestic policies may be in shambles, but many can be reversed eventually. However, his management of foreign affairs will leave damage to the world order that is likely to lead to permanent chaos. And the only winners in the end will be China and Russia. Much more dangerous than Sylvania.

While the optimists among use can dream of a post-Trump world where bi-partisanship returns, global trade reverts to normal and even long-standing alliances are restored, we get just one chance to save the only planet we’ve got. Although some think that it may already too late, there was a time (like before last year) when efforts were being made to limit the rise in the Earth’s temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) the maximum amount believed to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate, we are now on a dangerous path to potential oblivion.

Starting from his redo withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, Trump has waged an unremitting war against climate change mitigation. In addition to ordering the deletion of references to climate change in all federal information sites, he has expanded drilling in federally protected lands, repealed controls on methane and other dangerous greenhouse gases, ordered the Department of Defense to buy electricity from aging coal-fired plants, eased mileage standards for car makers and effectively banned the expansion of renewable energy sources, including wind and solar.

To execute his nefarious plan to counter the “climate hoax,” Trump has appointed a formerly moderate Republican Congressman, Lee Zelder, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Zelder, who once testified to Congress: “[w]e will have never done enough to ensure that our water and our air is clean, safe, and healthy” is another sycophant who is willing to sacrifice all principles to worship at the altar of Trump.

Environmental groups are lining up to challenge the repeal of the endangerment policy in court and certain states are looking to expand laws that are intended to help control the effects of climate change. But the forces of climate change deniers are on the offensive, and who knows how the courts will rule, especially with the Supreme Court becoming another enabler of Trump’s executive power.

Foreign and economic policy may come and go, but climate change is here to stay. And if you think the greatest dangers are to property, there is also a significant human toll. Much like the idiotic RFK Jr. anti-vaccine movement, people will die, whether as a direct result of catastrophic events, the increase in the dangers of respiratory illnesses or the dire effects of exposure to extreme temperatures. Trump won’t be around, but your children and grandchildren will be.

That time was 1980, and the place was Lake Placid, New York, the site of the XIII Winter Olympic Games, which will be remembered forever for the Miracle on Ice, when 20 American amateur college hockey players pulled off perhaps the biggest upset in sports history by downing the former USSR, arguably the greatest hockey team of all time, and went on to win the gold medal with a win over Finland.

With the opening of the Milano-Cortina games in Italy this week, that event is recalled in a Netflix documentary Miracle: The Boys of ’80 which reunites the surviving members of Team USA to relive and reminisce about their triumph. Even 45 years later and everyone knowing the outcome, the film is riveting in relating how their martinet coach, Herb Brooks, mercilessly molded a team of former rivals from mostly the Midwest and the Boston area into the greatest group of overachievers of all time and whose triumph will live for the ages.

Just about anyone who was alive at the time will tell you how they watched every minute of the game with the Soviets, sweating the last ten minutes after the US took the lead as the clock slowed to a torturous crawl. But the truth is that, in the days before ubiquitous TV sport coverage, the game was not even broadcast live, and I distinctly recall listening to it over the radio (the device that you turned on and nothing happened).

Hockey at that time was a regional affair, before the NHL had teams in Dallas, LA and (gasp) Las Vegas, and interest was mostly concentrated in the frigid Midwest and New England. But the improbable success of the US turned an entire nation into fans at a time when America was actually united in misery: inflation of nearly 15%, the lingering Iranian hostage crisis, the Arab oil embargo and a time when the Cold War was really cold. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 eventually led to Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the Summer Games in Moscow later in 1980.

The specter of Brooks hangs over all of the players’ memories. He apparently regretted not getting close to the players but that was a strategic decision that he believed was necessary for the team’s success. Brooks’ death in a car accident in 2003 was not the only tragedy associated with the team. Not mentioned in the film was Mark Pavelich, a key player who had modest NHL success (including becoming the first US-born player to score five goals in a game, for the Rangers), who fell into years of depression and took his own life in 2021.

Maybe sports is too important in our lives and vicariously shields us from the voids in our own lives. And, with the sellout of both professional and college sports to gambling mania, it has become more than a little pregnant. But at its best it can unite a community; it can bring us unfathomable joy or bitter disappointment: just like life itself. The various crises of 1980 seem almost quaint now, as our democratic institutions are under existential threat and hate and fear dominant what passes for our national discourse today. Can an event such as the Miracle on Ice once more lift us from the depths? The odds are long but I am sure you can find a Predictions Market that will take the bet.

Trump desperately wants to receive global recognition as an arbiter of peace having, as he claims, solved “eight wars in eight months.” But the actual matter is far more complicated given ongoing tensions surrounding the Mid-East truce and conflicts in the Congo and between Cambodia and Thailand still running hot, not to mention prospects for peace in Ukraine fading by the day. Trump’s threats to invade a NATO ally in Greenland and a possible invasion of Minneapolis by U.S. military forces are decidedly not helpful to his cause.

But if the world elite’s continue to thwart Trump in his quest for glory, you have to wonder whether there are other awards that Trump is being wrongfully deprived of. While FIFA President and Trump lackey Gianni Infantino helpfully invented the FIFA Peace Prize to pacify the president, even Trump can’t pretend that it’s the real thing. Surely, however, he must be worthy of other prestigious awards that are rightfully his.

The American and National Leagues Most Valuable Player Awards
While Aaron Judge of the Yankees and Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers were picked as repeat winners of the awards by the Baseball Writers Association, there are many who believe they were rightfully Trump’s. “They are called “American” and “National” for a reason,” claims Trump, “and since I am technically in charge of both, they should be mine.” While his own on accomplishments on the diamond were modest (a batting average well below the Mendoza Line) as a first baseman at New York Military Academy, those statistics “were probably doctored by the same incompetent head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that I fired.”

Academy Award — Best Actor
While the betting odds are on Timothee Chalamet for his uncanny portrayal of a table tennis hustler in Marty Supreme, there are those who support Trump as the real model, rather than Marty Reisman, for Chalamet’s character. “When I was growing up in Queens,” Trump asserted, I was a real ping pong champion. We called it ping pong then, not this woke sport called table tennis. Although I admit that the rundown housing on the Lower East Side that Marty grew up in was owned by my father.”

Grammy — Best Solo Performance
“There are Swifties and Beyonce fans. Newcomers like Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX and Chappell Roan may rule the airwaves, and let’s not forget Kendrick Lamar, but nobody commands the stage better than President Trump when he does the Trump Dance,” according to Vice President and noted cultural critic JD Vance. Kennedy (er Trump) Center spokesperson Roma Devari cited Trump’s unique technique in announcing his booking for 200 nights at the renamed center, filling many of the open spots resulting from other performers’ cancellations.

Pulitzer Prize — Journalism
“When it comes to journalism, Trump Rules,” according to incoming selection committee chair Steve Bannon. The failing New York Times, the Bezos Post, even our former friend Rupert’s once great Wall Street Journal: none now compares with TRUTH SOCIAL for the Truth, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth.”

FIFA World Cup
“Why bother with this whole rigamarole of a tournament?” Trump queried. “It’s just another opportunity for an invasion of smarmy Latin Americans, Mexican rapists, weak-kneed Europeans and Africans from shit-hole countries to invade our beautiful country. And I am not even talking about the fans. And do you believe that the Danes might qualify? They should be home pulling out their dogsleds to help defend their precious Greenland. Just hand me the trophy and forget the whole mess. Besides, I can make better use of ICE to attack California.”

Nobel Prizes — the Sciences, Medicine, Economics and Literature
Why stop with the Peace Prize? We all know that Trump could dominate any and all of these fields if he put his brilliant mind to it. The fact that his middle initial stands for “Jenius” is just one obvious proof.

Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities

Or not. How will we look back on 2025? Who knows? As usual there was The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. I will leave it to history to form its judgment. But, in an attempt to lend some order to the chaos that was this year, here is a compendium, in alphabetical order, of some of the people, events and movements that made 2025 memorable, for better or for worse.

A: Antisemitism. Whatever our leading universities teach that the president doesn’t like (see also DEI).

B: Birthright Citizenship. Fundamental Constitutional right clearly delineated in the 14th Amendment that White Supremacists hate.

C: Congress: The former third branch of government that used to enact laws and create the agencies that govern us.

D: DOGE: What government looks like when a billionaire technocrat on Ketamine is put in charge.

E: El Salvador. The country that houses the greatest concentration of former landscapers. Also, Epstein, Jeffery, whose treatment of young women was the worst since Hades abducted Persephone to Hell. The mere mention of his name makes grown men quiver.

F: Fascism: An ideology that was supposedly defeated thanks to the 500,000 Americans and millions of our European allies who lost their lives in World War II.

G: Gaza. Either the site of a horrendous genocide or a future Trump golf resort. Possibly both.

H: Hottest Year on Record. Trump fiddles while the country burns, and floods, hurricanes and extreme weather ravish the nation. Fossil fuels rule.

I: ICE. The American version of the Schutzstaffel (Nazi SS).

J: Justice. Formerly an independent department of the government that enforced the nation’s laws, now an enabler for election deniers, fraudsters and crypto conmen who know how to trade political contributions for pardons.

K: Kirk, Charlie. Christian nationalist, gun control and DEI foe, anti-gay rights warrior and right-wing martyr.

L: Legal Immigration: How our white, Christian ancestors got here.

M: MAHA. Playbook to bring back deadly infectious diseases.

N: Nick Fuentes. Hitler-loving, white Nationalist anti-Semite who dined at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump. Coined the term “Groyper.”

O: Ozempic. The miracle drug that substitutes for diet and exercise.

P: Pope Leo XIV. The first American- born spiritual leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics.

Q: Qatar. Small Mid-East nation that gave Trump a $400 million jet to be the new Air Force One and was granted an unprecedented security guarantee to an Arab country for its defense despite its purported past support for terrorist groups.

R: Robert Redford. The late iconic actor who had “great jeans” before Sydney Sweeney.

S: 6-7. The latest way for kids to make adults look stupid.

T: Tariffs: Extortionate consumer add-ons masquerading as economic policy that made us go back to our high school history texts to recall who the hell Smoot and Hawley actually were.

U. Ukraine. Where amateur diplomats are trying their best to reward agression and expand Putin’s Russia.

V: Venezuela. The future site of our greatest military debacle since Viet Nam.

W: White House. The most ostentatious building site since Trump’s Atlantic City Taj Mahal.

X: X. Social Media Hell.

Y: Yemen. The site of an intractable civil war that even Trump can’t include in the 8 wars he has ended “in just 8 months.”

Z: Zohran Mondami. New York City’s soon to be 34 year old Democratic Socialist, Muslim mayor who has promised free child care and buses and no rent increases and has the rich shivering about who will pay for it all. But, honestly, can he possibly be worse than Eric Adams or Andrew Cuomo?

Well there you have the whole alphabetical gambit. What will 2026 bring? The return of democracy? A Trump Nobel Peace Prize? Lower interest rates? Peace on Earth? An Oscar for Timothee Chalamet for Marty Supreme? Stay tuned. The journey is often more interesting than the destination. Sorta like Dante’s descent into Hell.

I expect that 2025 will go down as a disappointing year for the movies. It seems as if Hollywood does not consider a film marketable unless it is another Marvel extravaganza or a ghastly horror spectacle. And with the impending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Netflix (assuming Paramount does not succeed with its hostile competing offer), the movies are likely to get smaller and smaller, dominated by ad-interrupted streaming services marketed to those who prefer insular isolation to actually being among other people in a communal experience in front of the “Big Screen.”

There were notable exceptions of course. One Battle After Another, Thomas Paul Anderson’s tragi-comic epic that depicts Leonardo DiCaprio as a disillusioned former revolutionary who languishes in a bathrobe while smoking weed and being pursued by manic long-time nemesis Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and trying to protect his putative daughter from the consequences of his past actions. Despite its disappointing box office, it is the one movie that is sure to be remembered from this year.

Eephus may be my favorite movie of this year. Like the game of baseball and life itself, nothing much happens during the last weekly contest of a group of aging men trying to hold onto their childhood fantasies amidst the fading sense of community in a small New England town. [Warning: do not watch if you think sport mostly involves massive human beings bashing each other’s brains out on Sunday afternoons].

Other films of note include an under-appreciated Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag in which Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play a married British spy couple, one of whom just might be a traitor. Nice to know that there are still movies made for adults. Sentimental Value, Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s saga of two sisters trying to deal with their estranged father, a fading film director played by Stellan Skarsgard, in the wake of their mother’s death. Nouvelle Vague is Richard Linklater’s fictional version of the filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Not for everyone, but a must see for film junkies and Jean-Paul Belmondo fans.

F1 was a blast for Formula 1 and Brad Pitt fans, but while I enjoyed Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, most fans of the Boss couldn’t stand to see him in a dark, depressive period in his life, saved from childhood trauma by counseling. A shoutout nonetheless for Jeremy Allen White for his understated portrayal of an artist in psychological turmoil. And Spike Lee brought us Highest 2 Lowest, a remake of a 1963 Kurosawa thriller, in which the always outstanding Denzel Washington plays a record executive who believes his son is kidnapped in a case of mistaken identity.

I didn’t mention Sinners, which is on most critics’ “Best of the Year” lists because I just don’t do vampires. Nor Ari Aster’s Eddington, the first and probably last of the big Covid epics, in which Joaquin Phoenix and Pablo Pascal battle over mask mandates, Black Lives Matters and past loves. Only in America can a pandemic lead to unspeakable violence.

I still look forward to seeing Blue Moon, the sad tale of the composer Lorenz Hart’s alcoholic demise, La Grazia, Paolo Sorrentino’s latest depiction of the complexities of Italian politics, anchored by the inimitable Sorrentino stalwart Toni Servillo (Il Divo, The Great Beauty, Gomorrah) and Marty Supreme in which Timothee Chalamet plays a 1950s table tennis hustler (opening on Christmas Day).

But just yesterday I saw the movie that undoubtedly moved me the most: You Got Gold: A Celebration of John Prine, the one of a kind country-folk songwriter who managed to compose both the saddest and funniest lyrics in musical history. Prine’s songs portrayed real life better than anyone. Sam Stone, about a disillusioned war veteran hooked on drugs, Hello in There (loneliness and old age), Angel From Montgomery (an old woman who life has passed by) and Paradise (a lament to his father’s Kentucky hometown destroyed by coal mining) are his best known and most poignant songs.

The film is a recording of a memorial concert in 2022, after Prine’s death from Covid. Performances by his closest collaborators, Bonnie Raitt, Brandi Carlisle, Lucinda Williams, Jason Isbell, Kasey Musgraves, Bob Weir and Dwight Yoakam highlight the movie. Lesser known younger performers (I’m With Her, War and Treaty) are evidence that Prine’s legacy will continue.

You don’t need to be a Prine fan to enjoy this movie, but you will be after you see it. And don’t forget to bring your handkerchief.

Of course almost all of the works of the Italian Renaissance depicted religious images but there were many who believed and still believe that Angelico was not just a talented and groundbreaking artist, but that he received direct inspiration from God. So much so that he was described “as if absorbed in unconscious ecstasies, abandoning his hand to the guidance of otherworldly beings.” In 1984, Pope John Paul II declared Angelico the patron saint of artists.

Well, in our cynical and secular age, I don’t know how many still believe that God even exists, much less acts as inspiration in the world. But in France, where the principle of “laicite,” the strict separation of religion and the state, is ironically treated with almost religious fervor, I can attest based on my wife’s and my visit last week, that a modern miracle may have actually occurred: the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, which reopened last year after five years of painstaking rebuilding following the cataclysmic fire that nearly destroyed it in 2019.

Construction of Notre Dame began in 1163 and mostly completed during the Thirteenth Century. But it has always been much more than the center of French Catholicism and the finest exemplification of French Gothic architecture; it is a symbol of the nation. Stripped of much of its religious imagery during the French Revolution, it was restored to sacred glory by Napoleon and served as the site of his coronation and the funerals of many French presidents. When the fire engulfed the roof, Frenchmen who had long ago abandoned the Church wept.

The rebuilding of Notre Dame was made a national priority by president Emmanuel Macron and took an army of artisans schooled in mostly forgotten Medieval skills to accomplish the task. But the reconstruction has not been without controversy as the plan supported by the beleaguered Macron to replace the stained glass windows with a “contemporary gesture” divided a nation. But the crowds pour into the structure every day, not necessarily for religious reasons, but to express pride in a rare national triumph.

The reopening of Notre Dame and the triumphant success of the Paris Olympics last year are likely to be the high points of the Macron presidency. Remarkably, political partisanship in France may actually be more toxic than in the U.S. And it will take much more than these successes to salvage Macron’s legacy. That will truly take a miracle.