I was at an airport gate yesterday with a bunch of other recessionists who'd been enticed to travel by Virgin America's dirt-cheap cross-country web fare, all of us listening to a CNN commentator gripe about destitute banking concerns that plan to use a chunk of our taxpayer bailout to pay...

Okay, we've all had our fun making fun of Sarah Palin, from her Naughty Monkey shoes to her ability to confuse geography with foreign relations experience. It's time to stop rubbing our hands in glee at the train wreck we anticipate on Thursday night, and to hold her to the...

Here's a pop quiz for Sarah Palin:

1. What is America's national pastime?

4. Why would Westbrook Pegler care?

Don't feel bad if you don't know...

Listen up, waffling white ladies: Is there anything more narcissistic, more self-referential, than switching from Barack Obama to John McCain because Sarah Palin is a gal?

The latest Washington Post-ABC News Survey says that a bunch of white women voters have swapped sides since the Republicans...

U.S. News & World Report, the 600-pound gorilla of college rankings, may have to overhaul its law school rankings because law schools have figured out how to play the game better than the magazine that dreamed up the rules in the first place. U.S. News & World Report uses the...

Here's my question: How is it that a guy who's devoted his young life to the pursuit of excellence stands to win a $1 million bonus if he matches an existing record, while a woman who devoted a nanosecond of her life to bedding a would-be presidential candidate...

I happened to be in the room, researching a book, when a group of doctors were debating what to do for an 86-year-old woman with breast cancer. If she had been thirty years younger, with the same early cancer, the regimen would have included a lumpectomy with radiation. Instead,...

It's a nice irony, if you go for that sort of thing: Mother's Day and Father's Day hit just as mothers and fathers of high-school seniors start to get bills from the college and universities that are going to render them obsolete in the fall, or at least useful in...

Al Gore can rest on his laurels or take time out and run for President, because I have single-handedly discovered the key to global warming: Residents of New York City live in apartments and work in office buildings that are warm enough to melt the cheese on a foccacia. I...

Since we're all so excited at the prospect of putting medical records online, can we talk, for a moment, about security? A techie friend of mine told me recently about a nefarious site that somehow manages to mimic whatever site you think you're going to -- a shadow jcrew.com,...

The first time Hillary Clinton ran a television ad complaining about Barack Obama's unwillingess to debate in Wisconsin, he fired back with an ad of his own about the 18 debates he's already participated in and the two more that are scheduled.

She wouldn't let it go; her subsequent ad...

What a lovely scene - logs crackling in the fireplace, a row of stockings hung on the mantel, a big Christmas tree adorned with lights and ornaments. Eager children bound down the stairs in their pajamas, and everyone crowds around to see what's piled high under the tree.

Gift...

What is the sound of one latke flipping?

The Hebrew calendar, always full of surprises, aligns Hanukkah this year not with Christmas, but with first-semester final exams at colleges and universities across the country. For the first time in 18 years, we will not get to celebrate with...

On a Thanksgiving morning over half my life ago, my mother and I climbed into my college-graduation-present Datsun station wagon and set off from Chicago to Santa Barbara, California. My sister stood by the kitchen door in her pajamas and cried. My father, who had never lived more than...

Our daughter just turned eighteen, and, to celebrate, the bank that holds her checking account sent her a delightful little note. One of the advantages of being eighteen and having a bank account, it seems, is that she is eligible for $1,000 in accidental death [okay, I guess we'd have...

Let's not talk about theatre right off the bat, though we're headed in that direction. Let's start, instead, with the universal metaphor of romance, and the issue of putting out. Adults have lately lamented the adolescent sport of having sex on the first date -- oh, c'mon, it's not even...

As the World Series gets underway, I want to address what seems to me the most pressing issue in professional baseball, which is not steroids: What's with all the obsessive-compulsive behavior, most particularly the chewing of bubble gum?

My husband weaned himself from most televised sports a while back,...

She wasn't really trying to hail a...

If we could harness anxiety as an alternate power source, the lights in the New York Times' auditorium would have been ablaze last week, as hundreds of fretful parents of high schoolers convened for an expert panel on the proximate cause of their angst: the college admissions process....

Atonement and its modern cousin, apology, are on my mind as Yom Kippur approaches and Jews, everywhere, hope to be inscribed in the book of life for another year. I grew up in a hybrid household -- my father came from an Orthodox, kosher household, while my mother's family only...