If you see something, say something. That paranoid punch line of a public service campaign has worked: nobody looks the same way at a stray backpack on the subway, and we just might call the cops.

Sadly, the same adage doesn't apply to young American men and women watching guys...

This week, while we pick through our Valentine's Day chocolates looking for the good ones and watch our roses wilt, let's think about buying love. Not with chocolates, lingerie or jewelry, but with cash or credit card.

The Justice Department estimates human trafficking is the second fastest-growing criminal...

The 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, has come and gone. Forty years is a long time--back when contraception meant counting days and pregnant teenage girls were forced to give birth, 40 years was more than two generations.

Forty years means that an...

Last fall, two squads of pint-size players clashed in the crisp air at a peewee football field in Southbridge, Mass. The boys on one team were much larger than the others, and within six plays, three of the smaller boys had been carried off with head injuries, one with his...

By some accounts, there have been at least 200 documented, date-specific end-of-world predictions in the last two millennia. Now, having just passed unscathed through the Mayan apocalypse and the fiscal cliff, we're hearing that 2013's solar flares will end the world as we know it.

Wouldn't it be...

Besides being the month of Thanksgiving, November is the month of the Dead Kennedy. It's a time of remembering a day of blood and brains on a pink dress in Dallas, a portal into a black hole in the last half-century's history.

For those of us born in and after...

The Bombshell loves O. Like so many other American women who helped elect him in '08, I adore that great, always-ticking political brain. I love his health care reform, his calm, cool and collected kill order for OBL. His barely clothed socialist tendencies drive me wild, too.

The trouble is,...

This is an excerpt from my new regular column, The Bombshell, about the peculiarities of the fairer sex, at the New York Observer.

It can't be easy to be a man these days, what with the gender's looming end, but thinking about Naomi Wolf's new and much-ridiculed biography of...

I write today of a natural disaster threatening to do more harm to our future as a democracy than al Qaeda or the Red Threat before that.

We've seen alarming intimations of it for a few decades, but nobody bothered to act. We were all too busy rearranging ourselves around...

In the news, two apparently unrelated stories:

The first is that Baywatch "babe" Donna D'Errico got badly bruised climbing Mount Ararat looking for Noah's Ark. The second is a leaked document of Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu's first-strike plan for Iran.

Many people have a hard time seeing...

JERUSALEM -- It should come as no surprise that Michele Bachmann claims Huma Abedin, an aide to Hilary Clinton, might be a Muslim Brotherhood spy sent to influence the highest levels of America's foreign policy. Conspiracy theorizing, the classic Middle Eastern method of decoding power, is alive and well on...

That rarest of birds, an Egyptian female judge, is at the center of a controversy about how the military colluded with the judiciary to keep control over the reins of power even as the Muslim Brotherhood was winning the popular vote.

Judge Tahani el-Gebali told the New York...

Update from Sharm el Sheikh, a silvery beach town of casinos and unnatural fields of water-sucking grass, underutilized resorts and a McDonald's without the bacon deluxe cheeseburger.

Sharm means Shame in Arabic, and there is much of it to go around.

The palace where Mubarak retreated after he was deposed,...

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...