In 1973, while an English Major at the University of Maryland, College Park, I happened upon a Swahili word, baraka, and a poetic definition of the word that I have remembered for almost 40 years: "a luck so persistent it borders on grace."

So, in 2008, when...

I suspect that the current debate regarding the Transportation Security Agency's (TSA) current body-scanning machines and full-body pat downs will be resolved by a contest of public anger versus public apathy. However, there is also a third possibility: litigation. For instance, the mainstream media sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly...

Norman Mailer--the writer, the provocateur, the prisoner of sex, the enfant terrible, Marilyn Monroe's biographer and finally, the elder man of letters--died in 2007. But his life and his death have been transfigured into a writers' colony that searches the English-speaking world for the next generation of writers.

The Invitation

If the late, mercurial prize-winning novelist/journalist Norman Mailer were alive, he might very well say that Sarah Palin's political perfume has more than a whiff of fascism about it. Or, he might have said that Sarah Palin is the newest generation of hate and fear and that she loves her...