Throughout the history of war in this country, fallen soldiers have returned home to be buried, and are then honored by ordinary Americans every Memorial Day. Morris, a one-stoplight town in northwest Connecticut, has a small parade each year. Before the music starts and the marching begins, the few remaining...

The parents of Caster Semenya themselves deserve gold medals. They were the picture of poise and dignity in the face of this controversy that has thrown their daughter into one of the most humiliating public scandals in recent memory. They should have been enjoying their daughter's moment of triumph and...

Any idea that I was still a young woman was temporarily dispelled the first few days of the annual Tin House Writers Conference at Reed College in Portland Oregon. Organized by the cutting edge literary magazine of the same name, Tin House provides a crash course in writing for writers...

The topic of swine flu is getting nudged from the front page by stories that are actually and quantifiably big. For the moment, the networks are shedding the bold graphics and thriller-movie music that underlines the fact that this news story is going to frighten us to the core. Presumably...

It is the often the nature of a national security challenge that a government does not have the luxury to prepare specifically for the event that causes it to escalate. But the hostage drama in the Horn of Africa was particularly jarring, coming as it did on the heels of...

As a Catholic who lapsed in high school, only Lent has the power to draw me back in. I was raised to eat fish on Fridays and to give up an earthly pleasure in emulation of the ultimate sacrifice (my annual ritual was to forego candy) for the forty days...

In the hierarchy of email signoffs, by far the worst is 'Best'. Maybe it's just me, but nothing displays contempt more succinctly, or says "Leave me the hell alone from this point forward," as concisely as this most reviled of four-letter words. Here's the other encrypted message hidden in this...

Sometimes a big news story can open up fresh public discussion on perennially intractable issues, and the Michael Phelps pot-smoking debacle has done just that. The photograph of him has stirred up, once again, discussion of the need for de-criminalization of marijuana, the elevation of athletes as role models (and...

There was no dancing in the street, but there was rapt attention, and high-fives with big grins for me, one of the few Americans on Gorée Island today. Obama tee-shirts were everywhere, the one with the President in Ray-Bans. The scene in Washington was playing out in real time on...

It is the first week of January. If you had a Christmas tree, perhaps like me, you took yours down this past weekend. The paper towel-roll angel, my son's pre-school holiday project, is wrapped in her special tissue for another year. The lights are coiled around a Rolling Stone magazine...

This week, big minds are mourning the passing of the great Harvard historian Samuel Huntington, who died December 27 at the age of 81. Among the terms he added to the lexicon, academic and otherwise is "clash of civilizations."

This thesis has resonated deeply, if unconsciously, into the American...

Two years ago, while shopping for a new car, my father's conviction to buy American played daily in my head. For him, buying a U.S.-made car is dogma and an incontrovertible matter of principle that even sub-par road performance (which is often unrecognized in a non-car person) or the...

Every day seems to bring another headline-grabbing act of piracy in the lawless waters off the Horn of Africa. Earlier this year, while writing a Masters thesis relating maritime insecurity in Africa to U.S. national security objectives, I reported that, according to the International Maritime Bureau, acts of piracy...

Barack Obama is now the face of the United States -- the photograph we will see when we go through customs at JFK airport, or when we go to any U.S. Embassy on earth. The impact of this image, particularly at first, will be subtle, but immeasurable and its iconographic...

The town I live in has 3,500 people and this time of year, it seems almost cartoonishly picturesque. The clichés literally come to life: Pumpkin patches, apple orchards, streams of gold leaves blowing diagonally across the road. Though a mere two hours drive from New York City, this place has...

Two months ago, I completed the Global Master of Arts program at Fletcher, a one-year intensive degree in international affairs. For a year, I asked my husband and two grade school children to tolerate my all-nighters, as I churned out a paper on drilling rights in the Amazon, or submerged...