Standing on the sunny, well-guarded streets of Manhattan yesterday, basking in the communal joy of spring, watching the Pope's limo whiz up tulip-lined Park Avenue, I had time to appreciate the papal apology.

I'm not a Catholic or a formerly fondled altar boy, but the Pope's apology for demonic priestly...

I've resisted piling on Spitzer mainly because I've been struck dumb.

Like many New Yorkers, I totally bought his guy-in-white-hat persona. Bottom line is, as my dear husband pointed out, imagine how different this story would be if Spitzer had spent his $80G on a shrink.

So it...

I hate to admit this, but I haven't been able to decide which of the two eminently qualified Illinoisans now running for president I support. They both have their flaws and their strong points. The best thing about them, though, is that they both sprout from the mighty loins...

Federal and state authorities are hotly pursuing an alleged rapist/killer Marine on the run in some southeastern state. Updates on the search crawl under the CNN feed all day. Meanwhile, the screen displays a different sort of heinous American criminal, at large in, of all places, Abu Dhabi. This one,...

I'll be down in Washington this week to talk about my new book, Mirage , about the adventures and misadventures of the French scientists who founded Egyptology. While poking around in the temples and pyramids, these atheist scholar-explorers were participating in another, long-ago failed effort to bring democracy to...

As I write these words in an office above midtown Manhattan, armed men are disembarking from black SUVs on the street down below. A helicopter beats overhead. It's just a Homeland Security exercise, another nail in the coffin of my long-dead sense of security. Farther downtown, there's a hole where...

The demise of mountain state Republican Senator Larry Craig amuses those of us who enjoy watching right-wing heroes crash to the ground, spiked on their own hypocrisy. It further confirms my theory: prick any conservative and the kink oozes out. The rockier the rib, the more likely you'll find pink...

Oh har-dee-har-har. Don't you have a sense of humor, you bitches and ho's, nappy-headed or otherwise? What's wrong with "you people?" You one of those furry-legged fanatics, a bull dyke or what?

Against his will and apologies notwithstanding, Don Imus will be taking his long gray locks, styled and dyed...

Nobody sleeps anymore. White nights are the plague of our generation.

We lie awake until dawn, gnashing our teeth over missed opportunities, plotting revenge, envisioning catastrophe. As soon as my head hits the pillow, I see suitcase nukes and the undiagnosed brain tumor.

Lots of my friends medicate for insomnia....

What's so funny about this one is that the Jack Kennedy comparison really belongs to her husband - minus the war experience and impeccable social standing, of course.

Both men instinctively and unapologetically mixed political power with sexual power, making their ability to win voters and seduce women one and...

My mother, an Assyrian Christian born in Kirkuk, Iraq, emigrated to the United States in the 1950s. A retired school-teacher now, she spent the last three years glued to her armchair in Chicago, watching the destruction of her homeland at the hands of the nation of her children and citizenship....

A front page story in the New York Times on Christmas Eve about the pay gap between men and women completed the job on my indigestion that days of feasting and merriment had begun.

After gaining in the 1980s so that college-educated women made more than 75 cents for...

To: Santa Claus
North Pole

Dear Santa,

Forgive me for not writing to you in almost 40 years. I'd been mis-led to believe that we live in a reality-based world, and that you didn't exist. Shame on me! Please put some extra candy canes in the White House stockings...

A few weeks before he was murdered last month by gun-wielding men on motorcycles on the streets of Baghdad, the head of the Association of University Lecturers in Iraq, Assam al-Rawi, wrote an open letter published in an English-language Lebanese newspaper. Al-Rawi, a geologist, described repeated and inexplicable attacks on...

Around noon Monday, I ventured across midtown for some ATM banking and book-buying, the lunch-hour diversions. Emerging in the sunlight, I joined crowds smashed against the walls on 5th Avenue and throngs corralled behind police barricades that lined 50th as far as the eye could see in either direction.

Back in my feminist days of rage, I liked to imagine what would happen if the word "women" was switched with "blacks" or "Jews" in articles about how repressive Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan treated women. Imagine: There is a nation where blacks are ordered to cover themselves...

In London three years ago, I breezed into one of those phone and fax services where you can make copies, send faxes or place international phone calls from your own booth, for a fee. As I was paying on my way out, the Arab who ran the shop muttered the...

Mel Gibson's Hollywood career is over, and that's not a bad thing. I kind of liked him in the Mad Max movies, but it was all downhill after that. The worst thing to come of his anti-Semitic outburst is that it will be used to justify another expedited shipment of...

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness and Total Bodily Comfort.

Today and for the last two weeks, give or take a...

Today's picnic speechmakers will toss the word "freedom" around like so much salad dressing, shiny and slick. The word is generally meaningless in these parts, except as code for the liberty to drive SUVs and get lots of cheap stuff at Walmart, to live in gated communities, literal and figurative,...