This commentary was written by Debbie Bookchin for Vermont Public Radio and aired 8/14/09. Listen to it at: http://www.vpr.net/episode/46688/

One summer afternoon, forty years ago, I announced to my mom that I was leaving our New York City apartment and heading up to Woodstock for the three-day music and...

About 30 minutes before the start of the inauguration ceremony, we got a call from our closest Italian friend. He said he'd left us a surprise. At the bottom of the stairs from our apartment, as we headed out to watch the inauguration at a local bar with a BBC...

Last week at a Christmas party in the hills of Umbria, we were part of a captive audience listening to an American businessman holding forth on an ever-popular expat subject - the dismal exchange rate of dollars to euros. He informed his listeners that they needn't worry: In just a...

Nov. 23 update -- Silvio Berlusconi now says he is "jealous" of Obama's "tan"....

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's buffoonish reference two days after the election (Nov. 6) to Barack Obama as "handsome, young and tanned" is probably the only news most Americans have heard about Italy since the U.S....

By Jim Schumacher and Debbie Bookchin

There has been a lot of commentary--mostly negative--about the speech Sarah Palin gave Friday, October 24, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the one in which she decried federal funds being wasted on "fruit fly research in Paris" when they could be used to assist people with...

As left-leaning Americans living in Italy, we're often called upon by European friends to explain what happened to the America they once knew and loved. The theme of these inquiries is all too predictable: the mess in Iraq, a failed health care system, a tanking currency and a domestic economy...