Essays

Genius and the lure of young flesh.

Until recently, in the western world, the right of a Great Man to man-handle a reluctant, pliant young woman was simply not questioned. With the advent of sexual harassment laws, the old order is under attack. It won't go down easily. Novels by and about angry and accused men have been written about unfortunate incidents, movies made. J.M Coetzee's Disgrace, Philip Roth's The Human Stain, even Zadie Smith's On Beauty, tend to greater or lesser degree to sympathize with the accused. These Great Men, it seems, are helpless against their urges. In fact, their genius may well depend upon their consummated desires, and young women are fuel for the fires of their brilliance. And in the end, they are really willing minxes, whether they know it yet or not. Continue reading at The Huffington Post

The French do love an excuse to march dans les rues. About every few days, wending our way around Paris, we find inexplicable traffic blockages, heralded by truckloads of idling police buses. The cops in riot gear occasionally get out and smoke on the sidewalk, but otherwise they do nothing to either harass or encourage the protesters. Continue reading at Salon

I'm sorry I was in bed when the tear-gassing of the anti-fascist protesters was underway Sunday at the Bastille a few blocks away. I'd like to have been there, if only to witness Parisians' impassive hauteur disintegrate into something approaching embarrassment.

For Ugly Americans living in Paris, the Le Pen upset is cause for celebration. Continue reading at Salon

Being a Midwesterner transplanted to Washington's Shaw neighborhood, I was interested to hear Mayor Marion Barry's recent pronouncement that D.C. is safer than Topeka. While I love my house and my neighbors, and I have felt personally safe most of the time, I have also been closer to more shootings here than I ever was as a journalist in Baghdad or Haiti.

Soon after I moved in two-and-a-half years ago, the yellow crime-scene tape fluttered in the hot breeze on my street. Strung from the street signs to the door of an abandoned Victorian town house and blocking traffic, it gave the street an unintentionally festive air. The square it defined might have contained a used-car lot or a street fair or an ice cream social. A crowd gathered, adding to the carnival atmosphere. A sense of community descended briefly.

In recent months, the Clinton administration has launched an all-out effort to bring women voters back into the fold. The White House has recently instructed agency heads to offer up one women's event a month where the president might appear; soon it will create a new political outreach office whose sole aim will be to capture the female vote. At a cozy "roundtable" in the Old Executive Office Building earlier this spring, White House liaison Alexis Herman addressed a group of female reporters on what Bill Clinton has done for women. And Hillary Rodham Clinton has emerged from her post-health 

reform funk as a born-again feminist, expressing support for women at venues from Lahore to Copenhagen to New York.