The Obama administration has outlined a three-pronged strategy in Afghanistan, focusing on security, governance and economic development. But the implementation of those elements has been woefully lopsided. Since 2002, 93 percent of the $170 billion the United States has committed to Afghanistan has gone to military operations. As the country prepares to send 30,000 more troops…
January 3, 2010
Jim Carrey's Yes Man recently hit movie screens nationwide. Thousands of moms and dads let their teenagers see it because it was rated PG-13.
But Carrey's character, in a rather graphic scene, receives oral sex from a willing elderly woman. It's played for laughs, but it's hardly funny. The Motion Picture Association of America, the organization that assigns ratings to movies, has…
January 5, 2009
You are embarrassing yourselves. With your "Yes We Can" music video, your "Fired Up, Ready to Go" song, your endless chatter about how he's the first one to inspire you, to make you really feel something. It's as if you're tacking photos of Barack Obama to your locker, secretly slipping him little notes that read, "Do you like me? Check yes or no." Some of you even cry at his speeches.…
February 10, 2008
Comment
A decade ago, the Catholic Church tried to annul my marriage. My former husband, Joseph Kennedy II, wanted to remarry and stay in the good graces of the church; to do so, he needed the ruling. Despite 12 years of marriage and two children, a tribunal of the Archdiocese of Boston decided that our union was never valid;…
July 28, 2007
Portrait photographer Marion Ettlinger once told me that the worst thing to happen to her art form was the demise of smoking. A cigarette, after all, not only gives a subject something to do with his hands, but it seems to provide an uncanny cure for camera shyness, allowing a facial expression and a physical posture to integrate into some ineffable moment of truth.
May 23, 2007
The debate about immigration reform is shifting dramatically, and with it the high-stakes negotiations between Democrats and Republicans that have been taking place for several weeks now in a backroom on Capitol Hill.
May 12, 2007
I used to believe unequivocally in the free flow of information. That is, until I read about a study published in this month's issue of Psychological Science that found neurotic men are more likely than non-neurotic men to worry themselves to death. Literally.
May 12, 2007
Despite being 43 years old, I was talked into starting a MySpace page to help promote my book. However, in my scramble to collect friends, I've set up some fairly rigid guidelines: pretty girls, yes, but no strippers; comics I've met, yes; comics I haven't, no; anyone who confuses "you're" and "your," you're out.
May 5, 2007
It often comes as a bewildering surprise to Americans that not all people think democracy is the best system of government, even when they value its ideals. Often, a fear of insecurity or a preference for well-being over free-for-all politics is at the heart of this.
Singapore may be the classic example of a country that has grown in a generation from rundown equatorial backwater…
April 28, 2007
'That's some nappy-headed hos." When white radio shock jock Don Imus dropped this little gem about the Rutgers women's basketball team onto the airwaves, he couldn't possibly have imagined that it would trigger a two-week suspension of his radio gig.
April 12, 2007
Presidential candidate Barack Obama is trying to quit smoking. There are, of course, many good reasons to.
He will significantly reduce his own risk of serious disease and that of those around him by not smoking. But clearly, one of the reasons Obama wants to quit now - beyond pressure from his wife - is that it would be widely perceived as unseemly and inappropriate to have a smoker…
March 5, 2007
Last week I received the shock of my life. I found out that my family was enslaved by the family of the leading segregationist of our time, the late senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
I don't know whether Thurmond himself was my blood relative; there has been no DNA testing yet. What I do know now is the horrific details of how my great-grandfather and family were slaves,…
March 2, 2007
'I got fed up with all the sex and sleaze . . . of rock 'n' roll," Tony Blair said before he was elected, "so I went into politics." Yet today he stands accused of bringing sleaze closer to the center of British democracy than any leader since the dawn of universal suffrage.
February 3, 2007
Polls tell us that Americans want to be less involved in Iraq and more involved in Darfur. It's not hard to understand why. For the American public, and many of its leaders, Iraq is a tainted war without good guys. Darfur, by contrast, is a chance to save the helpless.
In our minds, Iraq and Darfur seem to fit into neat categories: One is a botched war; the other is a humanitarian…
January 20, 2007
