Susan Faludi was a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who, in the 1990s, walked away from daily deadlines to become a big-time feminist interpreter of American life. She’s tough and she’s startling.
Now, Faludi is looking at post-9/11 America, and here’s what she sees: a frightened country that has retreated to a core national myth from the wells [...]

Round seven in the Democrats’ drumbeat of presidential debates was a slugfest last night. The prime target: frontrunner Hillary Clinton. The attackers: just about everybody else on the stage.
The first primaries are just two months away now. No time to waste. Obama promised fireworks, but seemed mild on the attack. Edwards was on fire about [...]

Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party tend to blot out everything else in 20th-century German history. But before Hitler made Berlin a capitol of tyranny and death, there was a decade and more of democracy in Germany. It was called the Weimar Republic, and its birth was strange.
When German generals saw they were losing World [...]

Bestselling writer Ben Mezrich has made his name and fortune tracking young hot shots chasing big money on the edge. He did it in “Bringing Down the House” and in “Busting Vegas,” where fast cars and fast women and casino life were the currency.
Now he’s doing it in the world of oil: oil traders, the [...]

Elyn Saks is a powerhouse high achiever by anyone’s measure. Top of her class at Vanderbilt, Oxford-trained, a Yale Law grad, and now a high-profile law professor at USC.
Elyn Saks is also a full-blown schizophrenic, a brilliant veteran of — her word — madness.
For years she hid it, even from family and friends. Now she’s [...]

It’s a chemical world. In our water bottles, our furniture, our cosmetics and lawns and food, we are surrounded by synthetic chemicals. Since World War II, some 80,000 have been introduced. Forty-two billion pounds worth are produced or imported in the U.S. every year.
At the same time, Americans face a phalanx of disease and health [...]

Sometimes a novel’s plot is unlikely. Sometimes it’s ripped straight from life — or life we can easily imagine. Novelist Tom Perrotta’s latest book, “The Abstinence Teacher,” is the second type.
Ruth is a broad-minded sex-ed teacher at the local high school — in a suburb where evangelical Christians are taking charge of the local culture. [...]

The American world was lit by fire this week. From coast to coast, television put the devastating roar of California wildfire on the national hearth.
But in the light of that fire, there’s much else to consider. Huge new requests for war funding, and a $2.4 trillion dollar projected price tag on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Washington laying [...]

Deep in the cocoa bean plantations of Brazil and beyond, there’s a chocolate revolution underway. Deep, dark, intense, pure chocolate — extreme chocolate — is rising up as the chocolate of choice like never before among chocolate connoisseurs and beyond.
Chocolate that lives very close to the bean. Forget milk chocolate. This is 70 percent pure [...]

September 16, Nisour Square, Baghdad. Heavily-armed guards from Blackwater USA, on the job, opened fire, and left seventeen dead: men, women, and children.
In the weeks since, the world has opened fire on Blackwater, and the exploding, multi-billion dollar realm of super-charged private armies that it represents. The “mercenary industry” is the new tag. Gunfire, and [...]

Captain of the punditocracy Chris Matthews came up the hard way in Washington. The hard-charging host of MSNBC’s daily talk-fest, “Hardball,” started life in the nation’s Capitol as a Capitol Hill policeman — a starch shirt, gun-on-hip security guard.
But that was before he worked for Jimmy Carter and Tip O’Neill and, more lately, spent his [...]

Fires — big wildfires — are as natural as wind and rain and sunshine in Southern California. But there’s nothing natural about the giant human populations that now live in Southern California’s burning hills — or did live there until more than half a million were ordered out this week in the teeth of the [...]

Legendary pop music producer Phil Ramone was a violin prodigy and Juilliard kid who got started early on the glam side of the pop music business. When Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” for JFK at Madison Square Garden in 1962, it was Phil Ramone adjusting the mike.
When Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, [...]

Former Wall Street hotshot, now Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson is orchestrating a big banks “mega-fund” to help mop up the subprime mortgage mess — and try to get some of that bad debt off the books and avoid a deeper credit crunch that could still stove in the U.S. economy.
The stakes are high, but still [...]

The warning bells could hardly be louder: oil at $90 dollars a barrel on Friday and polar bears bobbing on too little ice.
If global warming and war in the Middle East were provoked by a century of fossil fuels and cars, just maybe changing cars can change the problem.
The race is on for cars that [...]

The “Daily Show” may be going down, and Leno and Letterman and “Desperate Housewives” and “Heroes” and a whole lot of movies. The writers behind most of American television and movies are talking strike.
It’s been almost twenty years since a Hollywood writers’ strike. In 1988 it was about their piece of the video rental pie. [...]

When it comes to the high arts, the 20th century brought abstraction, challenge, even chaos. In the paintings of Picasso, or Rothko, or Jackson Pollock, those hallmarks draw a crowd. In music, they have cleared halls and started riots.
Stravinsky drove them mad. Schoenberg sent them running. Now, celebrated New Yorker critic Alex Ross listens back [...]

Mayhem in the streets of Karachi, Pakistan, yesterday as Benazir Bhutto came home from exile to bombs that killed and wounded hundreds, exploding within yards of her entourage.
It’s a tough world out there. In Washington this week, tough politics. A children’s health veto stands. An Armenian genocide resolution heads for the shelf. Bush says he’s [...]

Country singer Merle Haggard once said he thinks Ronald Reagan should be up on Mount Rushmore. Merle Haggard and a lot of other white American males.
Since Reagan marched on the White House with his “stand tall” message, white men have been the go-to backbone of GOP election victories — and the Democrats’ Achilles heal.
In ‘08, [...]

China looks like a giant these days — and in many, many ways it is. The Chinese boom has flooded the world with mountains of Chinese products. It has flooded China’s treasury with cash and built a red-hot economy on China’s booming coast.
But as the 17th Communist Party Congress sat down in Beijing this week [...]