Dominic Ciafardini is having something of a moment, and he has the late film critic Roger Ebert to thank. Upon Ebert's death last month, the New Yorker's cartoon editor Robert Mankoff noted that Ebert...

As Gertrude Stein called America her country but Paris her hometown, St. Louis may be where I was born and raised, but Boston is where I am from. When the Tsarnaev brothers bombed, shot at, and otherwise...

We first meet Wadley, one of nine tiny heroines in Richard Robbin's wrenching documentary Girl Rising, walking to school in Haiti a few hours before 2010's devastating earthquake. She is priming herself for a recitation of an 1802 speech...

When the only thing Democrats and Republicans can agree on is that Chuck Hagel should not be the next secretary of defense, the United States of America is in for it. In a milieu of bimonthly catfights over whether and how the government should pay its bills, mass shootings veering...

"I think I'm going to sit this election out," a 20-something friend-of-a-friend sighed to me during President Obama's dreary first debate performance, in a tone strongly suggesting he expected a high-five in reply.

"Sorry?" I asked.

"There's no difference between Obama and Romney."

"No difference to who?"

"No...

For those in the know, the name Lee Miller usually evokes topless picnics with Man Ray along the Riviera, an icy blonde modeling a violently violet hat on the cover of Vogue and some of the most striking photographs from the liberation of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps at...

"Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," Henry Kissinger once said. That line is usually trotted out every time it becomes necessary to explain the appeal of an aging statesman to an alluring intern, but in Game Change, HBO's new docudrama about McCain-Palin ticket, the aphrodisiac of power is all internal....

Rachel Cook was manning the European rotation of her futures trading job late one night in 2008, when she clicked on Nicholas Kristof's New York Times column "The Women's Crusade". As she read Kristof's manifesto-to-arms on the impact women-to-women microfinance loans have in lifting destitute women from Kabul...

"The law," Aristotle said, rather hopefully, "is reason free from passion." If at its most ideal, the American justice system reaches this tempered height, the execution of Troy Davis on Wednesday night illustrated that when it comes to two of the most inflamed subjects the courts can address--race and capital...

The opening pages of US Weekly feature a column with a title that has always struck me as more than a little obvious: Stars -- They're Just Like Us! A smattering of celebrities are shown in ultra-unflattering photographs, a recent sampling of which includes these stars "looking bored at meetings,"...

Who knew global warming would require so much fur? As vast swaths of the country foray into single-digit temperatures, I have noticed an unpleasant trend, even on the generally sartorially savvy streets of Manhattan -- the supposition that the more ludicrous and unkempt you look, the better able you will...

Last Tuesday night at the Plaza Hotel, an impressive array of advocates for the rights of children in foster care gathered to support Children's Rights, a national watchdog advocating on behalf of abused and neglected children. With rousing speeches by Governor Jon Corzine and rapper Run DMC followed by an...

In the opening scene of The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg sits with his girlfriend in a far more boho bar than I ever saw in Harvard Square. Obsessed with gaining entré into a final club, he prattles on about the access he could give her to people she "wouldn't otherwise...

In October of 2008, I stood in a line ten students deep at the Kennedy School of Government on a Wednesday morning, waiting to get my absentee ballot notarized. Among others in line with me was a marine from Oklahoma giving the line a last minute pitch for McCain, a...

All right, New York, we need to talk. There's a reason that I moved here, and it wasn't because I have some inchoate desire to live in say, Death Valley or the Mojave Desert. The temperatures you've been leveling at us these past few weeks have been obscene, and are...

We may not have been its architects, but I think it is safe to say that my generation will be the Corporate Social Responsibility generation. We will be the first generation to come of professional age in companies with CSR divisions tasked with finding logical partner charities, "optional" company charity...

If we have ever spoken, ever, I have tried to persuade you to read "The Road." Friends have been subject to countless wine-infused rambles on its importance, strangers on its opening pages next to me on planes have been assaulted by my flurry of promises on its life-altering qualities, librarians...

Grace Kelly has always been a sort of shadowy figure to me. Perhaps this is because she was blond and I am brunette, and as such I have intrinsically dismissed her as an irrelevant role model, but I knew almost nothing about Grace until I found an old biography of...

It's 11:30PM ,and water is dripping through my ceiling. This must be what they mean when they (the amorphous "someone else" these things always happen to) say there is a leak in the apartment upstairs. What do I do? Tape cardboard over it? Put a bucket underneath it? Call...

One Sunday afternoon in 2000, my twelve-year-old self wandered into one of Saint Louis' hipster consignment stores and found a pair of poppy red DKNY bell bottoms I was convinced would change my life. In the sea of pastel North Face fleeces, denim miniskirts and whatever the precursor to Uggs...