I’m at a dinner party in Sag Harbor.
The puckish, balding man with an electric grin-slightly wild, slightly wacky, a
comedian with a tragic sense-says to me: “Ah, French women. They are so
beautiful; they know how to keep themselves beautiful for men. They want to
attract us no matter how old they are. They Read More
It isn’t at all clear to me why Officer Joseph Gray, who was
drinking in a topless bar for hours before he killed four family members in a
drunk-driving accident, was engaging in a perfectly legal activity, while any
number of black mothers who, say, transported a package of coke from downtown
to uptown for Read More
Once upon a time, on my first trip to France, when I was
living in a dormitory for American girls and feeling free as a bird, loose as a
leaf and frail as a snowflake, I met an American boy who’d been on a Fulbright
in Finland and had a notebook filled with poetry in Read More
What a strange and uncomfortable business it is, this
six-decades-late apology by the president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski,
for the raw and unprovoked murder of the 1,600 Jewish men, women and children
of Jedwabne by their Christian neighbors. It’s no surprise that this apology
angered the local priest, as well as Cardinal Józef Glemp, who Read More
As most of the reading world knows by now, I have a daughter
who is living with AIDS. She has written about it in a book and in stories
appearing in prominent places. She has been a columnist for the AIDS magazine POZ . One of her sisters has written
about it, as have I. Read More
It happens in the best of families: Someone gets mad and,
before you know it, heads are blown off and body parts are landing in the tea
cups. With the recent disaster at the royal palace in Nepal, the mysterious
East has gotten a little less mysterious, suddenly more like Weehawken, Boise
or Scarsdale. According Read More
We now know what to name the
thing in the closet that goes bump all night long, disturbing our sleep. It is
the Taliban, up to no good. The Taliban rules more than 90 percent of
Afghanistan, keeping women the powerless, propertyless, uneducated captives of
their fathers and husbands, covered from head to toe. Read More
We now know what to name the thing in the closet that goes bump all night long, disturbing our sleep. It is the Taliban, up to no good. The Taliban rules more than 90 percent of Afghanistan, keeping women the powerless, propertyless, uneducated captives of their fathers and husbands, covered from head to toe. Now Read More
Can Judith Nathan, First Girlfriend, hang around the Mayor’s mansion with his family, or is she de trop when she crosses that threshold? You’d think that Donna Hanover and Rudy Giuliani, being grownups (in age at least), could have resolved the question in the privacy of their lawyers’ offices. But there it is, in court, Read More
No one ever thought of
Gerard Manley Hopkins as being a with-it kind of guy. Emily Dickinson wrote her
poems in a little room on a quiet street in the quiet town of Amherst, Mass.
The only Internet code one might
have detected streaming through the room came from the energy of her mind
musing Read More
