It's official: New Yorkers aren't entitled to the same freedoms that residents of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and after New Year's, New Hampshire can take for granted. I refer, of course, to the right of all the state's citizens to marry the individuals they love, and to enjoy the thousand...

Until this week, it probably would have been hard for most Americans to answer the question, "What do Kanye West, Serena Williams and a formerly obscure congressman from South Carolina have in common?" But now we know: They've all become over-emotional in public and displayed some very bad behavior. But...

To hear a lot of Republicans with microphones lately, you'd think that America's foundation is a big pile of hardware -- specifically, guns. On Sonia Sotomayor's last day of Congressional hearings, Senator Tom Coburn seemed to imply that if slaves had only been armed, they wouldn't have been slaves, as...

Lately, if I turn on the news and I'm in one of my more mordant moods, I start wondering why the NRA hasn't launched a lucrative travel channel show. They could start each segment with "Today's shooting comes to you from..." and do a travelogue on this particular American locale,...

The news that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnson have split up has been confirmed for a few days now, and so far, I haven't heard any conservative outrage directed at this very public unwed mother who chose to bring a child into the world without benefit of heterosexual marriage....

With each leak from Katie Couric's Sarah Palin interview, the damning evidence that the governor is supremely unfit for the VP job -- or any public office -- approaches flood level. If you're looking for consistency in this topsy-turvy world, look no further. She says she's well-situated "as Putin rears...

How have Obama supporters gotten any work done this week? Ever since Sarah Palin was trotted out on to the national stage, I must have received a dozen viral e-mails about her on a daily basis. These have included the Eve Ensler piece from these pages, the one about the...

In the short week and a half that Sarah Palin's been on the national stage -- though sure, it feels like an eternity -- she's brought tens of millions of Americans together and animated them to wage a no-holds-barred fight to take back the presidency. I'm talking, of course, about...

Yesterday on MSNBC's Morning Joe, the eponymous Joe Scarborough and his colleague Mika Brzezinski were having an intellectual smack-down over Hillary's emblematic gas tax holiday scheme, and whether it grew from the candidate's desire to help the little guy or her own political future. Personally, I think it's the...

As the mother of a 13-year-old girl, I couldn't resist trying to use the Miley Cyrus media tempest du jour as an opportunity to engage in one of those much-heralded parent-child teaching moments. So this morning, between bites of breakfast, I tried to engage my daughter in sharing her...

So I'm reading the New York Times at the local nail salon while getting a pedicure, when a front-page article titled "Power to Build Border Fence is Above U.S. Law" grabs my attention. And maybe it's the way the attendant is massaging my leg with warm water, or the late-afternoon...

Yes, reading about health insurance is so dull it can cause hysterical blindness. But please bear with me, dear reader, as I share a snippet of an illustrative phone encounter I had with my family's healthcare provider the other day. I promise to keep it short.

ME: Hi. I'm...

The news of yet another shooting spree--the latest, as of this writing, at Northern Illinois University--begs a question that's rarely asked these days. Not "Why did he do it?" It's human nature to want an answer to that one, of course, even though the headlines move on well before anything...

Reading Heather Cabot's persuasive plea for a cell phone-free Valentine's Day (so romance can happen absent a jingly ringtone serenade), I'm inspired to piggyback with my own argument for making the experiment permanent. The work/life balance isn't my issue, though; I'm in front of a home computer all day,...