Nina Burleigh

New York's tabloids have been going crazy over the story of the "soccer mom Madam" who is alleged to have made millions serving up Eastern Europe's finest young exports to some of the richest men in America.

We should be asking: why are the women indicted, while the clients --...

Cairo -- The sick obsession with controlling women and baby-making is a bottomless well of weirdness.

In Egypt, and other nations, Indonesia and Turkey among them, certainly the Gulf States, doctors or midwives are sometimes asked to perform "virginity tests" to ensure that a man is getting a bride untouched...

Rick Santorum's outrageous attacks on contraception and gay marriage are rooted in the notion that sex be about procreation only. He is not alone. He expresses the views of a very engaged edge of GOP primary voters, and Romney et al dare not uphold more moderate positions, lest they lose...

Last night I had an interesting exchange with a smart NYC high school senior, who challenged me on the notion: if you think women don't mind walking around with black blankets over their heads in 120 degree heat, then you need to reexamine whether you think women are like you,...

We never met Jose Pimentel, recently removed from our shared neighborhood in upper Manhattan to a terrorist holding cell downtown. But we might have passed him on the street, up by the bodega, because he looks a lot like the other young men hanging out on the corners of Broadway...

While the warm water pro-lifers in the House worked to pass the "Let Women Die" act - that is, a bill allowing emergency room workers to opt out of performing lifesaving abortions - the beautiful, lawyer-daughter of a rape victim has been helming a movement, about to bear fruit in...

In a few days, Amanda Knox will either be set free or ordered to remain in jail, from where she will most certainly file another, final appeal against her murder conviction. Whatever the Italian appellate judge and jury decide to do with her and her onetime boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, one...

The man New Yorkers elected as their latest Sheriff of Wall Street seems so much smaller than one expects a man in such an outsize job to be, sitting behind his huge desk flanked by a potted rubber plant on one side and the state flag on the other. Behind...

Choppers securing the Hudson for today's 9/11 commemoration jolted us awake at dawn.

I'm among those who won't be participating in the ceremonies downtown. For one, I have no interest in sharing any part of my city with President Bush, whose multi-trillion-dollar, needless folly of a war with Iraq did...

Born in the 1980s and '90s, the right-wing girl Millennials grew up at a time when Reagan was almost ancient history, second-wave feminism was fighting grandma's battles, and the background noise was the whir of talking heads debating whether oral sex was sex at all, courtesy of Bill Clinton. With...

I won't pile on top of the esteemed gentleman from Brooklyn-Queens today, much as he might enjoy it. But he has posed -- make that hoisted to half-mast -- some sexual-politics issues that deserve airing at least as much as those gray boxer briefs.

A former (male) editor...

Articles in the New York Times today and in the New Yorker this week confirm a fact of life I've suspected for a while. In our PC world, misogyny, unlike racism or gay-bashing, is in fact the last allowable taboo.

The Times piece today, Section A, page 22, for...

In 1799, the French artist Vivant Denon, accompanying a team of scientists traveling to Egypt with Napoleon (who excused his invasion with the logic that he was bringing democracy to the Arabs) was touring some ancient sites along the upper Nile when he came across an 8-year-old girl in severe...

Yesterday morning I amused myself twittering about how the House Republicans would prefer the sick to die homeless in tents. At about the same time, a crowing blast-emailed press release landed in my inbox, cheering the Republicans. It was from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free market think tank...

With apologies for being late to the Freedom book party:

Reviewers who called it "a masterpiece" and "a work of total genius," had me intrigued, but I'm glad I waited for a frugal friend, who bought the book at Costco, to finish reading and send it to me, rather than...

If anyone still doubted, or hadn't noticed, that misogyny is the fundamental pillar on which radical Islam is based, the news that poison gas was pumped into girls' schools in Afghanistan, likely by the Taliban, ought to confirm it.

The story, first reported in the U.S. in...

I happen to be in Portland, Ore., this week, where hell's magnet is pulling another hero down, down, down.

There's a lot to do in Portland besides get a below-the-belt massage. In the ten blocks around this hotel, there's the Oregon history museum, art galleries, fantastic restaurants. Anyone can ride...

I'm not usually a Miami girl, but I do love my Florida.

I used to run off to the Keys around my birthday in early springtime every year and check into the cheapest motel I could find. For native Chicagoans like me, after the long freeze, any old efficiency will...

The tragic images of dying, oil-drenched animals and the underwater spew in the Gulf are sickening. They make us feel ashamed to be human, certainly ashamed to be driving our cars.
There is one upside to the unfolding disaster, though: at least we don't have to drink it.

What some people call the clash of civilizations is not a fight between Islam and the West but between science and faith. The religious rightists in America may want us to believe that they are different from the theocrats of Iran and the fundamentalist of Al Qaeda who teach their...