"It is not easy to get through the ages from [a] self so estranged and one overdoes the lair." -- Samuel Beckett in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy 1956

Fame came late to Samuel Beckett. In 1950, Beckett at 44 was still an unheralded, Irish author...

This weekend, the national media focus will be on the September 11 events at Ground Zero in New York City, as well as those commemorations being held in other parts of the country. While these memorials with their attendant partisan controversies and out-pouring of patriotism will hold most people's attention,...

We've all read newsy accounts of airline captains' heroism and tragic incompetence this past year. But it's rare to get an actual glimpse of what's going on in the cockpit (except for those stuttering last- minute black box tapes) and what your captain was up to before he strapped himself...

Imagine this: In 2008, your fiancé is out on his bicycle and he gets stopped by the police for riding on the wrong side of the street. A database check turns up a deportation order in absentia that dates back to the 1980s that was supposed to have been resolved...

On the day the Senate Finance Committee discussed Montana Senator Max Baucus' latest health care bill proposal on Capitol Hill, 150 protests against health insurance industry influence and profits took place across the country. I went to a protest held in midtown Manhattan.

On a scale of political demonstrations...

Friday is September 11th, a day that has become our national, annual moment of truth: "Has it really been that long?" we ask ourselves. "Are we any safer or better off?" "What have we accomplished?"

In New York City, all eyes turn to ground zero our symbolic barometer of...

Few inmates at Rikers Island jail could identify a Picasso or Matisse painting if it was hung in their cell. But the dozen or so young men who are lucky enough to attend Elizabeth Josephson's art class at the jail can not only identify the masters, many of them do...

How many fraudulent nonprofits can be spun on the point of a needle? The answer these days in New York City is, as many you want.

Miguel Martinez, who resigned as councilman on Tuesday, pleaded guilty on Thursday to three federal charges involving kick-backs and stealing $40,000 from a...

It takes more than the truth, sometimes, to change the way people think about an event. It may require an award winning, investigative book, or a clear-eyed, hard-hitting documentary to trigger a change in perception. In the case of the Central Park jogger trial and its aftermath, which I wrote...

One spring night, twenty years ago two tragedies occurred in Central Park. Trisha Meili, a white 28-year-old woman out for an evening jog, was raped, brutally beaten and left for dead. And five African American and Latino youths (aged 14 to 16) were picked up by the police, arrested and,...