Traveling around the world for over 30 years, I've felt the reputation of our country shift back and forth. During the Vietnam War, doing graduate work in London, I had to fend off in-my-face anti-American arguments and insults even though I was young and against our involvement. I just tried...

I can't forget an incident in China that seems almost unreal. And with the world scrutinizing every aspect of this country as the Olympics begin, now is a good time to write about it.

I first visited in 1984, a few years after China had been opened to the West....

Here it is, another family holiday for singles to deal with. My kids usually spend July Fourth with their remarried dad, and while I'm on good terms with him, I'm not a part of the post-millennial reality that includes exes invited to the table; it's easier to do that when...

Count me among the many regular, non-celeb folks who are missing George Carlin. I so admired his funny-tough take on things, his fearlessly speaking what we were thinking but were afraid to say, and his love and mastery of words. I bought his books, saw him perform stand-up in Vegas,...

When I read the first reports about Senator Ted Kennedy's glioma, my heart sank. I felt such empathy for him, and for his family. My husband, Chaim Stern, was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the worst type of malignant brain tumor, in July, 2001.

Chaim was a public figure too; a...

I often go out to movies by myself without thinking much about it, and travel solo to the ends of the earth. But I still can balk at dining out alone, especially on a weekend night.

Breakfast and lunch are pieces of cake (sometimes, alas, literally). And I can do...

Holocaust Remembrance Day and Mother's Day, both commemorated by Congress, occur in early May. And every year, around this time, I think of Cecile.

I met her about twenty-five years ago. Fragile, intelligent, in her mid-fifties, she was a Holocaust survivor finally ready to tell her story. She had written...

In February, I came within a few degrees of 70 latitude south in Antarctica (see Solo to Antarctica ...) And I returned a few days ago from northern Greenland at the same latitude north, 250 kilometers above the Arctic circle. (As my friends wryly note, I'm now bi-polar.)

Witnessing...

Some of us are fools for love, and I guess I'm one of them. I've been around the block (more like around the world, and then some), so stuff happens.

In honor of the silly spring day which gives us welcome pause to reflect on the...

I just saw 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the Romanian film focusing on Otilia (Anamaria Marinca, superbly naturalistic as a college student), surviving within the oppression of the Ceausescus' communist control. With dramatic irony, we are aware that the malignant system she endures would end two years...

Diane Sawyer's revived 20/20 special about a Bunny Ranch, and "Kristen's" fast-moving musical career call to mind my interview a couple of years ago with a Nevada hooker.

Things started when I dated a meticulous, ambitious law firm partner who admitted that throughout his former marriage he not only...

Day 9

We enter the 600 mile stretch of water separating Antarctica from Cape Horn, the southern tip of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago at the bottom of South America -- perhaps the worst water passage on earth. Storms can intensify the westerly winds and whip the sea into massive,...

Days 6-8

Wake up at 7 am, open my curtains and in front of me is a mile-long, 100- foot-tall rectangle of floating ice -- smooth and massively white in the sunshine. I feel its coldness from my verandah. Thousands (millions?) of years old, this enormous slab broken from...

My Antarctic cruise on the ship called the Azamara Journey begins in Buenos Aires. I had traveled there 10 years ago with an introduction from a world-famous architect. Truth is, I had sat next to him a dinner party in New York, and when I arrived in that grand South...

I like my adventure not just soft; I prefer mushy. But from what I've heard, to get to Antarctica -- the coldest, highest, windiest, driest, and iciest continent on earth, I'll be rocking and rolling on the world's roughest waters, The Drake Passage around Cape Horn. The fact that I...

He found me on the Internet. He was a physician, and he liked my smile and he wasn't afraid of intelligent women and he never had a real love and I had one late in life, and he liked that because it meant we might, too.

He had a...

Despite the excitement of "The Supers," Bowl and Tuesday, I decided to get away from these obsessions for a long weekend. The mayhem of a pre-Lenten carnival seemed the perfectly timed short escape. My friend Lorry, a New Orleans resident and a Mardi Gras maven, would be my traveling companion....

I dined alfresco the other night at one of the dozens of cafes that sprawl along the Lincoln Road mall in South Beach, savoring coconut chicken soup under a red umbrella, listening to a strolling guitarist in shorts strum "Yesterday."

The moon over Miami was cliché full, a warm...

With all the primary turn-arounds, media pile-ons, and shifting momentum, I'd like to share a couple of personal experiences I've had with Hillary Clinton.

Some background: My late husband Chaim was the long-time rabbi at a reform temple in Chappaqua, New York. When the Lewinsky mess was at its...

I'd rather be forced to read a dozen New York Times columns by Bill Kristol than go to a wedding alone. When the slow-dance music starts I usually head straight for the ladies room, or the door. And as for funerals, well, they're obviously difficult for anybody.

But the...