NEW YORK: Last week, I submitted an affidavit to support an important lawsuit brought by reporter Chris Hedges and others, including Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky, against US President Barack Obama and his defense secretary, Leon Panetta.
The (...)
NEW YORK: In the wake of the Quran-burning by troops at the United States' Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, protests continue to escalate, and the death toll mounts. In the process, three US blind spots have become obvious.
One is that of the US (...)
NEW YORK: One of Iraq's only working filmmakers, Oday Rasheed — whose brilliant film 2005 Underexposure followed a group of characters in Baghdad after the United States-led invasion in 2003, and whose new film Qarantina is now premiering — is in (...)
NEW YORK: What does the New Year hold for the global wave of protest that erupted in 2011? Did the surge of anger that began in Tunisia crest in lower Manhattan, or is 2012 likely to see an escalation of the politics of dissent?
The answers are (...)
NEW YORK: As turmoil stalks America's financial markets and protests fill its streets, Americans' lifestyle choices are evolving in a telling way: once seen by the rest of the world as an exuberant teenager — the globe's extrovert, exporter of rock (...)
NEW YORK: America's politicians, it seems, have had their fill of democracy. Across the country, police, acting under orders from local officials, are breaking up protest encampments set up by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement — (...)
OXFORD: The top and the bottom of the list of countries in Newsweek's recent cover story, “The 2011 Global Women's Progress Report,” evoke images of two different worlds.
At the top of the list — the “Best Places to be a Woman” — we see the usual (...)
NEW YORK: As I listen to the news coming out of England after the recent wave of urban riots — and as I read Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's compelling new biography of Charles Dickens, “Becoming Dickens” — life and art seem to be echoing each (...)
NEW YORK: It is obvious that the left and the media establishment in the United States cannot fully understand the popular appeal of the two Republican tigresses in the news — first Sarah Palin, and now, as she consolidates her status as a (...)
NEW YORK: It is hard to ignore how many highly visible men in recent years (indeed, months) have behaved in sexually self-destructive ways.
Some powerful men have long been sexually voracious; unlike today, though, they were far more discreet and (...)
NEW YORK: As Swedish prosecutors' sex-crime allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange play out in the international media, one convention of the coverage merits serious scrutiny. We know Assange by name. But his accusers — the two Swedish (...)
OXFORD: Just when it seemed that America's “Homeland Security state” could not get more surreal, the United States Transportation Security Administration has rolled out a costly Scylla and Charybdis at major airports: either you accept dangerous (...)
NEW YORK: British Prime Minister David Cameron's government has announced some of the most draconian public-sector cuts any developed country government has ever attempted. Indeed, his minister of education recently declared that funding for (...)
NEW YORK: In the 1992 United States presidential election, George H. W. Bush's campaign made a political splash by going after the television show Murphy Brown — one of the first times, but far from the last, that a fictitious character was (...)
OXFORD: I confess: I do it, too. Like most Western women, I do it regularly, and it is a guilty pleasure every time. It is hard to listen to one's conscience when one is faced with so much incredible temptation.
I am talking, of course, about (...)
CANNES: This year's Cannes Film Festival was marked by a profound contrast between what unfolded along La Croisette, the palm-lined sweep of pedestrian walkway that stretches between swathes of luxury hotels and the azure Mediterranean, and the (...)
NEW YORK: Barack Obama, however mixed his accomplishments to date as US president, has sought to rebrand America and reclaim its former signature asset: its ability to embody universally admired values. As popular culture is usually the way those (...)
COPENHAGEN: The past decade has proven again and again that empowering women worldwide holds the key to solving many seemingly intractable issues that have otherwise stymied policymakers. Poverty in the developing world seemed ineradicable until (...)
COPENHAGEN: The past decade has proven again and again that empowering women worldwide holds the key to solving many seemingly intractable issues that have otherwise stymied policymakers. Poverty in the developing world seemed ineradicable until (...)
NEW YORK: Ever since the first "Tea Party convention was held last month in Nashville, Tennessee, with Sarah Palin as one of the keynote speakers, America's political and media establishments have been reacting with a combination of apprehension and (...)
NEW YORK: Do nations have psychological processes - even Freudian processes, such as collective egos that can be injured, and repressed guilt feelings that can well up from the collective unconscious - just as individuals do? I believe that they (...)
As the world struggles to emerge from the economic near-collapse of last fall, there is one sub-group that has slid below the waterline in record numbers: formerly middle-class women. A new report shows that a million American middle-class women (...)
NEW YORK: In late September, the American press was filled with data on women's happiness. Marcus Buckingham, a business consultant, made the case that the data showed that women have become less happy over the past 40 years. Blogs, newsmagazines, (...)
NEW YORK: Last week, rumors from the world of print media were rife: a hundred reporters from The New York Times news desk to be bought out - or to lose their jobs if they refuse; steep cutbacks at British newspapers; staffs slashed at Condé Nast - (...)
NEW YORK: When caricature takes the place of dialogue, everyone suffers - especially when it comes to understanding issues affecting women, who struggle worldwide against being silenced. Some right-wing American bloggers recently twisted an article (...)