Nina Burleigh

Talking to Sky News

2013-05-17T18:46:46Z

We used to watch Sky News in the cafes of Italy and the tabacs of France and they interviewed me recently about the Amanda Knox trial. Here's the link.

For CNN: What Amanda Knox Can Tell Us

2013-05-14T15:38:11Z

My thoughts on Amanda Knox breaking her silence, at CNN here.

Swanee Hunt

2013-05-14T15:23:05Z

I profiled Texas heiress Swanee Hunt, who is using her super-conservative, Red-baiting Daddy H.L. Hunt's money for feminist causes. She wears red cowboy suits, walks around with an African Grey on her shoulder and is generally in the can't make it up category. A real American original. Here.

Diss Diss Bang Bang

2013-05-03T21:58:54Z

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" - William Congreve.
Not!
Musing on men, scorn and fury here.

Sullivan County Democrat Interview

2013-04-12T02:16:26Z

I did an interview with our local Callicoon newspaper some years back. The reporter, Jeanne Sager, now has her own blog called The Stir, on Cafe Mom, and she's generally cool and brilliant. You can read her blog here.

And the interview, where we talked about Mary Pinchot Meyer, Ben Bradlee, CIA, James Smithson, living in Paris, writing, and researching like Nancy Drew - and having our great little babies, is right here.

The Knox-Haters

2013-04-03T04:55:02Z

I wrote this piece for Time about the Amanda Knox's guilter blogs. The editors shortened it, leaving in my stalking experience, cutting out examples of egregious behavior directed at others, like Candace Dempsey and Mark Waterbury, whose Facebook and wikipedia pages have been attacked and erased, among other nasty things. Proving my point, the story got 2500 comments in a few days. Some people collect garden gnomes, some do this.
Here's the full article.

The Iraq War Comes Home

2012-12-12T17:29:37Z

A nine-month investigation I did with Bloomberg and Businessweek, on homelessness and young female veterans, led me to meeting Nira Williams, a former army truck driver with a harrowing and sadly too common story involving prescription drugs in the field, sexual assault, PTSD and addiction, followed by homelessness.
Readt he full story here.

Rahm Emanuel profile

2012-11-17T16:10:42Z

, former White House Chief of Staff (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I spent Columbus Day in my hometown with the new Mayor, Rahmbo Emanuel. I knew him as a Clinton soldier in DC back in the 1990s, when he mailed dead fish and stabbed tables. He's mellowed quite a bit. Interesting man.
Here's the profile.

The Bombshell

2012-11-16T21:41:19Z

I write a weekly column for the New York Observer, and when I'm on my game, it makes strong men weep. Read it here.

WNYC podcast on Mirage

2012-11-08T14:15:33Z

I talked to Leonard Lopate at WNYC about how the West discovered Egypt. Listen here.

The Wondrous Awards Shelf of Junot Diaz

2012-10-12T12:53:07Z

Welcome to The Bombshell, a regular column about the peculiarities of the fairer sex.

Ever since the Swedes gave Obama the Nobel Prize before he'd actually done anything, I've wondered what goes on behind the closed doors of the secret chambers where they bestow such honors.

And never more than now, with the MacArthur Foundation's baffling decision to deem 43-year-old fiction writer Junot Díaz a "Genius" worthy of the legendary award's half-million-dollar paycheck.

It's not that Mr. Díaz hasn't written a great novel. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao didn't captivate me, but that's because I'm not inclined to care that much about tubby science fiction geeks with girl issues, even when limned in the admirably deft and much-praised brushstrokes of Mr. Díaz's affecting, hip Spanglish prose. In the five years since then, Mr. Díaz has written just one other book, a short story collection called This Is How You Lose Her.

But, in his brief wondrous literary career so far, Mr. Díaz--now a tenured professor at MIT--has collected more medals than Michael Phelps. Starting with his Pulitzer for fiction in 2007, awards have stuck to him like burrs. He's bagged a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize and a raft of lesser-known (to me anyway) awards including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, the 2008 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction, the 2008 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the Massachusetts Book Awards Fiction Award in 2007.

Oh, and he now sits on the 20-member Pulitzer Committee himself, perhaps in a newly created job counseling young writers about how to cope when the psychic and emotional weight of all their awards gets too heavy and they find that all their friends hate their guts.

There's something about giant literary awards that attracts other awards, like protons and electrons. But is it possible that one young writer could be deserving of all these prizes? Was there truly not another worthy writer during the last five years to whom the judges at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, say, could have granted a prize, given that their chosen boy had already had bagged a Pulitzer and a Goog?

These are subjective calls, and I reveal my own biases when I admit I would have awarded the Genius grant to Gillian Flynn for Gone Girl and her weird, sickly meditation on mother-daughter resentment, Sharp Objects; or to Lauren Groff for Arcadia, her heartbreakingly beautiful end-of-an-era novel about the generation born of hippie parents. And I'm not being sexist. There are even men who deserve it: Jess Walter, for Beautiful Ruins, and Jonathan Dee, for The Privileges--two writers whose work is brilliant, engrossing and revealing about our times.

This brings to mind a perhaps apocryphal quote I've heard attributed to Hemingway (but cannot find in any Google search this morning): "Literary prizes are like life jackets tossed to men who know how to swim and have already reached the shore."

So far in his brief wondrous life, Mr. Díaz has reached the shore with books exactly three times. He published a well-received collection of short stories first, called Drown, followed by galloping blockbuster Oscar Wao, and then, five years later, his new collection of short stories about love from the point of view of a helplessly philandering male narrator whose wayward urges prevent him from finding lasting love.

The colorful and insular world Mr. Díaz reveals in his writing is particular, but the universal theme is male concupiscence. Oscar Wao's titular antihero moves to New Jersey from the Dominican Republic and comes of age in America. But the book's chief narrator is Oscar's roommate Yunior, a self-described "player" who can't stay true to his girlfriends and is compelled to mess around with all their sisters too.

At one point Yunior shows a touch of self-awareness: "What I should have done was check myself into Bootie-rehab," he writes. "But if you thought I was going to do that, then you don't know Dominican men."

Yunior reappears in This Is How You Lose Her as a professor and writer who cheats on his girlfriends. The key plot point is curiously the same in many of the tales: the girlfriend discovers his infidelities because she cracks open his notebook and reads his diary notes about the encounters. Or, she reads his emails.

Don't you hate when that happens? The reviewers adore it. Calling Yunior "a Latino love rat in New Jersey," The Guardian writes that "the chief pleasure of these stories is the unflinching honesty Díaz brings to the subject of betrayal." Noting that Díaz "writes best about players," The L.A. Times says "it's the voice of male-driven sex and love obsessions that makes Díaz's stories most memorable."

Reading the short stories in the collection, I had a nagging sense of familiarity. At first, I couldn't put my finger on it, then I realized who Yunior reminded me of: Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom.

Yes, the booty-chasing white suburban alter ego of John Updike, one of the great phallocrats of 20th century American letters, a man also constitutionally unable to cross the street with getting a literary award stuck on his shoe. And not just Updike, but Philip Roth and Norman Mailer too.

The demise of such fiction was predicted not so long ago in the pages of this very publication. Sven Birkerts, writing 15 years ago, noted that the postwar male ego in fiction was going the way of the Marlboro Man.

And no less a literary light than the sainted David Foster Wallace, also writing in these pages a decade and a half ago, called Updike "just a penis with a thesaurus" and predicted the end of the primacy of "Great Male Narcissists in American fiction. "Most of the literary readers I know personally are under 40," Wallace wrote, "and a fair number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar G.M.N.'s."

Fifteen years after those declarations, literary awards jurors are irresistibly drawn to this Latino Updike, if you will, younger, hipper, bilingual, less prolific certainly, but still plowing the same field as his predecessors, along with the same sorts of all-too-accommodating women. The heart wants what it wants, right? Like the GMNs of yore, Díaz's alter ego is utterly beholden to his wandering penis, yet never examines his compulsion to bone everyone in sight.

In showering Mr Díaz with prize after prize, literary jurors seem to be saying the post-war GMN isn't dead yet. Is it the wars, the terrorism, the recession, driving the longing for a regenerated machismo that Mr. Díaz's multi-culti cred makes acceptable again? Is it a feminist backlash?

Mr. Díaz's wondrous bewitching of prize committees comes at a time when women writers remain wildly underrepresented in publishing, on both the reviewing and the reviewed side. According to VIDA, which tracks women in the arts, the count in 2011 was dismal as ever. The London Review published work by 117 women and 504 men, The Paris Review published work by 20 women and 46 men, The New York Review published work by 163 women and 627 men. It goes on and on. Interestingly, there is more parity over at Pulitzer, where, since 1982, 18 men and 12 women have won for fiction.

I suspect that there's more to Mr. Díaz's multiple awards than either sheer talent (which he does possess), latent machismo among male awards-granters or even wish fulfillment for a bunch of pointy-headed dweebs. Mr. Díaz has acknowledged being guided in his writing career at Rutgers by two female titans of the post-male, multicultural literary establishment: Sandra Cisneros and Toni Morrison. In the end, Mr. Díaz's crowded awards shelf might have as much to do with wise investments of "Who You Know" currency as anything else.

Last week, Mr. Díaz was on CBS This Morning talking to Charlie Rose about how the windfall will change his life. "It gives you an enormous amount of time and room," he reflected. "I told a friend of mine, it's like finding an extra bedroom to your apartment." Yunior would certainly put that chamber to good use.

Nina Burleigh is the author of The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox among other books. Follow her at @ninaburleigh.

Who's Afraid of Vagina Wolf?

2012-09-17T14:32:42Z

Welcome to The Bombshell, a regular column about the peculiarities of the fairer sex.

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 the vagina has reminded me once again of the main reason why I would not want to be a man, or, make that a heterosexual man. Having sex with a woman is a complicated challenge. It exhausts me to think of it.

I feel sorry for the mystified males who have to have sex with us. One friend recently left by his wife wants to write a book for men called Stop, It Tickles. Here is how he explains his title: You meet a woman, she likes you a lot, you get together and maybe get married. But there always comes that night when you are doing the thing you always did, the thing she always liked, and suddenly she says: "Stop, it tickles." And that's the beginning of the end of all of it.

Read the rest at The Observer.

With Cairo's High-Tech Islamists

2012-09-17T14:28:15Z

Beneath the arched, soaring, pale yellow ceiling of a room in the maze of Al Azhar University, past the wall of black-and-white portraits of imams dating to the 12th century, Heba Zakaria, age 32, sits across from a blackboard scrawled with the email address topmedia4u@gmail.com. (English is still the lingua franca of the Internet.) Zakaria is a member of the ascendant ruling party in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party. She is one of the new generation of postrevolutionary, politically active, religious Egyptians using social media, cell phones, and other ostensibly liberating technologies--tools that just may end up tamping down intellectual freedom and women's rights. When I asked to meet with members of the Muslim Brotherhood's new media outreach team, their spokesman sent me to her.
Read the rest at Discover Magazine.

What's God Got to Do With It

2012-09-11T16:21:51Z

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 the connection between a Hollywood TV bunny looking for proof of God on a hilltop in Turkey and Israeli national security state calmly planning to trigger World War 3.

Look again.

After a month visiting Biblical sites in the Middle East, the connection between God and conflict in the Middle East becomes inescapable. Israel is filled with sites holy to all three major religions, and religious Jews regard the entire nation as a sacred site. It's not just a country with a flag, and a bureaucracy, and a budget, it's actually God's country. It's the spiritual made real.

This belief illuminates and inspires all manner of odd behavior, from settlers periodically trying to take back the Dome of the Rock from the Muslims in Old Jerusalem, to thousands of amateur archaeologists sifting through rubble cast off from the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa mosque plaza, hoping to find some bits of proof that Solomon's Temple lies beneath that, bits that could be used to take it and all of Jerusalem back for modern-day Israel -- as the Bible commands.

Israel religious-nationalist politicians' sense of entitlement, inherent in plans for unilateral pre-emptive bombing, always provokes an "end of days" resignation among Americans. That passivity is just one end of a spectrum related to belief in the "history" contained in the Bible.

On the other end of the spectrum, one finds people like World of Bible Ministries "archaeologist" Randall Price taking money from donors to search for Noah's Ark, and it's not cheap. One also finds documentary filmmakers and writers cashing in handsomely. One of them was backed by no less a Hollywood patriarch than James Cameron. The producers have claimed to find things like Christ's DNA in a Jerusalem cave, or the actual nails that nailed the Messiah top the cross, or John the Baptist's Cave. They "find" them and then as reliably as the Little Drummer Boy tooting through every Rite Aid on the day after Thanksgiving, they get their "new evidence" in front of millions of Americans around Easter-time on Discovery Channel or National Geographic TV.

For the same reason that James Cameron would back such a documentary -- gulled and moneyed blind American faith in Biblical truth -- our government will tacitly go along with many of Israel's craziest, maddest schemes.

Many of the Bible stories and characters in them -- Adam and Eve, Abraham, Noah, Moses, Solomon -- have no historical basis. The more archaeologists dig and the more historians search, the less certain they are of almost every aspect of the Bible, from Exodus to the conquest of the Promised Land to the existence of a grand ancient Israeli empire.

Certainly the real reasons behind Israel's preemptive strike plans have more to do with modern geopolitics than with the Bible. And the production of pseudo-science to sell believers on the historicity of the Bible, what one archaeologist had called "archaeo-porn" -- has more to do with money than faith.

But many among us -- from Christians in America to religious nationalists in Israel -- persist in reading the Bible, a document written in the 7th century BCE by a small group of priests in the desert, as a blueprint for God's plan for the Middle East, giving politicians like Netanyahu cover, and enriching charlatans who hawk proof of the Bible on TV and in print.

On many trips to Israel over the years, I have visited Megiddo, the site of the Biblical Armageddon -- the war to end all wars that will usher in the return of the Messiah. Busloads of Holy Land tourists -- many of them American Christians -- are driven onto this site every day, led by preachers waving the Bible, some pointing in the direction of Iran and quoting scripture about the forces of darkness and the end times, some even calculating the billions of cubic feet in the Biblical reference to rivers of blood filling the plains below at the end of days.

The site is actually one of the most fruitful and important archaeological excavations in the region, with 30 cities dating millennia on top of each other, yielding a wealth of actual information to modernity about the waves of poly-ethnic settlement in the area before and during the Biblical years, as well as the battles between the global powers of antiquity -- Egypt, Babylon, Assyria -- waged on this strategic spot.

The archaeologists who dig at the site every summer sometimes overhear the Holy Land guides spinning their Bible yarns, and they laugh at them, but no one bothers to correct them. Archaeologists and historians unfortunately don't engage much with misguided popular notions. Those who have challenged the very commercially lucrative Biblical versions of history are promptly sued or otherwise cowed into silence.

So a Baywatch beauty climbs the big hill looking for Noah's Ark and falls flat on her pretty face. And Bibi plans a Biblical-style wreaking of vengeance on the ancient force of darkness over God's mountains to the east.

I haven't been to Iran, but we already know the mullahs there are finding their own prophet-stamped encouragement for bellicosity.

Meanwhile, the godless rest of us can only stand and wait.

Or maybe we are supposed to ask God to help us.

Read the comments at Huffingtonpost.

Into the Arctic Ocean

2012-09-11T14:51:24Z

My daughter and I took this amazing trip into the Arctic Ocean in June, getting up next to walrus and polar bear in bays and inlets only accessible thanks to the dreaded polar ice melt blamed on man-caused climate change. I hope these animals survive.
Here's the story in DuJour Magazine.