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 [...]

“On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the borders of Russia and war began,” goes Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel “War and Peace.” “That is,” wrote Tolstoy, “an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature.”
And in a pair of lines, we are deep in [...]

School shootings and the shadow of youth violence around them are very much in the news these days. In the last decade — from Columbine, to Amish country, to last week’s deadly shooting in a Cleveland school and images of an angry Philadelphia teen’s shocking arsenal — the headlines have become almost routine.
Gun. School. Mayhem. [...]

When it comes to gambling, Americans are on a roll. In 1960, there was not a single state lottery in the country. Now there are 43.
And casinos? Once they were the exclusive marks of sin cities like Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Now they’re all over, and promoted like motherhood and apple pie. Have a [...]

The news from Turkey, even before last week’s House committee vote on Armenian genocide: U.S. standing with a key ally since the Cold War is in the cellar. Turks, who feel they stood with the U.S. again and again for decades, now say they see the United States as a major threat.
If this relationship collapses [...]

Every parent knows kids need a good night’s sleep to be at their best. And still, young Americans from elementary school age through high school, are sleeping significantly less today than they did thirty years ago.
With homework and TV and the Internet and video games and parents getting home later from work, it’s easy to [...]

Last week’s Nobel Prize for Al Gore on climate change has lit up the issue again globally, including on the American campaign trail in the ‘08 race for the White House.
As in no other election cycle in American history, candidates are being aggressively buttonholed on what they would do about global warming. The range of [...]

Novelist Doris Lessing waited a long time for her Nobel. At almost 88, there’s never been an older winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, announced yesterday in Stockholm.
But Doris Lessing has always been on her own path. As a girl in colonial Rhodesia who broke out of convent school and made herself a writer. [...]

Oslo to Al Gore: You may not be the American president, but you’re a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Holy moley! And that just capped the week’s news.
The Dow’s over the moon again, but inequality widens too. Armenian genocide history lands in the lap of Turkish-American relations just when America needs Turkey. Fred Thompson joins the [...]

Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya was a passionate, powerful advocate of American intervention in Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. He laid Saddam’s crimes before the world, begged for action, dreamed of the democracy that could be.
He promised George Bush in the Oval Office that American soldiers would be greeted with “sweets and flowers” in [...]

If you’re an American voter who identifies with the Christian right, you’ve got to see Kansas Senator Sam Brownback as a stand-up guy. Brownback, a GOP presidential contender, stands up for traditional marriage, for prayer in school, for “faith-based” government programs.
He stands up against abortion, against embryonic stem cell research, against gun control. Critics call [...]

Back in the day, American business schools had a tough time fighting their way onto American university campuses. Academics didn’t see what they taught as a serious profession worthy of a spot.
B-schools made their case, arguing they had a science of management and the nation’s greater good at heart. And a million M.B.A.s were born.
Now, [...]

Across the country, and especially in the great Midwest, the corn pickers are in the fields today, bringing in what is projected to be the biggest corn harvest in American history.
Through corn meals and corn sweeteners and corn-fed livestock and corn-brewed ethanol, Americans eat and drink — and now are beginning to drive on — [...]

For Camelot buffs, it’s a famous tale, told with blood and gusto in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” King Arthur, Guinevere, and their knights of the Round Table sit at a Christmas feast, young Sir Gawain at their side.
A massive green knight in green armor on a great green horse rides right into the [...]

For decades, breast cancer was seen as an affliction of affluent women in the industrialized West. And heaven knows it is that. In the U.S., one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer.
But the world’s most lethal form of cancer for women is not bound by borders these days. From South America to [...]

We’ll look at the top cities for young workers.
Guests:
Matt Woolsey, reporter for Forbes.com

As workers hit 55, 60, 65, many aren’t losing sleep over the big move to Florida, but instead over the big presentation a week away.
So much for retirement! Some can’t afford it. Others just aren’t ready.
As for their employers, there are companies that think it’s great — the AARP just named its top 50 employers [...]

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf won a messy and still legally disputed election over the weekend. Looks like another term for the U.S.-backed strongman. Maybe he’ll take off his military uniform, or maybe not.
Just to add to the confusion, a U.S.-backed rival to Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto, may return now from exile. Meanwhile, a battle in Pakistan’s [...]

Eight hundred years ago this week, in the mountains of a Persian-speaking realm now known as Afghanistan, a great mystic poet of the Islamic world — and now the whole world — was born. In his lifetime, Jalaluddin Rumi and his family fled before invading Mongols, across what’s now Iran and into Turkey.
Today, his ecstatic, [...]

THE FIRST QUESTION WE ASKED SENATOR CLINTON WAS ON THE WAR IN IRAQ….AND WHY AT LAST WEEK’S DEMOCRATIC DEBATE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, NEITHER CLINTON NOR HER CLOSEST COMPETITORS — SENATOR BARACK OBAMA AND FORMER SENATOR JOHN EDWARDS — PROMISED TO WITHDRAW ALL U-S COMBAT TROOPS FROM IRAQ BY THE END OF THE NEXT PRESIDENTIAL TERM…IN [...]

Fireworks all over this week. Jimmy Carter loses it with Sudanese security in Darfur. Congress tees off on Blackwater. Romney goes after GOP front-runner Giuliani. Hillary Clinton’s money machine blasts past Obama’s.
In Washington, the President vetoes SCHIP, child’s health care, and gets heat from fellow Republicans. Clarence Thomas delivers a memoir, and the high court [...]

Novelist Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 2001’s “Empire Falls,” grew up in the kind of small, gritty town that he has written about for more than two decades. He knows the pride of blue-collar work, the shame of not having enough, and about the neighbors who live just a little too close.
In his [...]

Senator Chris Dodd wants to be president. He’s already spent 6 years in the U.S. House, and 27 years in the Senate. A Washington outsider he’s not. But in an election where experience might really matter, Dodd says he’s your man.
He draws strength from his family history, stretching back to his dad’s days as a [...]

Nobel prize-winner James Watson, of “Watson & Crick” fame, of DNA and the epic discovery of DNA’s double helix structure, carries one of the most storied names in modern science. Right up there with Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and Marie Curie.
His pioneering work broke open the great age of genetic science we live in now. He’s [...]

The improvised explosive device, the IED, the roadside bomb has been the great killer of American troops in Iraq, the great equalizer between the world’s most powerful military machine and the Iraqi insurgency.
When you see Iraq veterans missing arms, legs, body parts, the terrible odds are an IED did it. The Pentagon has spent billions [...]

Fifty years ago this week, Americans were smacked awake on space by the orbiting wonder called Sputnik. The Soviets were up there. We were not. And only a first foot on the moon could ease the shock. America was number one in space.
Fast forward to 2007, and the high frontier is looking like nobody’s backyard [...]

Well, nobody’s talking about the almighty dollar anymore. Driven by American debt and deficits, the once-mighty US greenback is now at parity with the once-laughable Canadian dollar for the first time in three decades. It’s a pipsqueak next to the Euro.
If the fall is good or bad, it depends on where you stand, and how [...]