For the Daily Beast, here, a story about how sexual violence has been a tool to keep women silent, and how the greatest step forward for women in Egypt has been taken by a few brave souls who have stood up and talked about it, publicly.
Journalism
For the Daily Beast, here, a story about how sexual violence has been a tool to keep women silent, and how the greatest step forward for women in Egypt has been taken by a few brave souls who have stood up and talked about it, publicly.
I talked with a number of the sisters of the Brotherhood while I was in Egypt. 
I spent the Ferragosto week, Italy's big summer holiday, in Prato, interviewing Chinese workers and entrepreneurs who have come to Prato, Italy's historic textile producing city, and taken over a sector of the fashion industry. The whole feature is here, in Businessweek.
Rebecca Kiessling embodies the right-wing female firebrand in all the clichéd ways. She has long, straight blonde hair, a law degree, and bears a resemblance to Anne Coulter. She's married, a home-schooling mother of five, and vehemently pro-life. What sets her apart though, and what has made her the optimal spokeswoman for radical pro-lifers in the abortion wars, is that she is a daughter of rape, conceived when her biological mother was abducted at knifepoint in 1968. She likes to point out that she has spent her 41 years on this earth only because abortion was illegal in the state of Michigan that year. Her mother went to two back-alley abortionists before being forced, because of the law, to carry Rebecca (whom she gave up for adoption but recently re-adopted) to term.
Read the rest of the story here at TIME.
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 him, the behemoth black
iron shell of the Freedom Tower -- Manhattan real estate's rough,
unfinished rebuke to terrorists -- hogs the sky and blocks out the
sunset.Read it here
In Beirut, I met this courageous 
Like the pioneer families in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books, Iraqi refugees Naef and Suad and their seven children spent their initial winter on the Great Plains huddled indoors, suffering from shock and cabin fever. "The first time we saw snow, we were so excited, and the kids went outside and played," their father recalls. "But after that we felt like prisoners in our own home. There was so much ice, we only went to the store once a week. Continue reading at Parade
The clues to the great secret were always there, but growing up in a neat-as-a-pin beige ranch house in northeast Portland, Oregon, in the 1980s, Amanda Campbell could never connect them. It was like trying to see the outline of a forest made of mirror trees. Supposedly she had two baby books; someone had half-joked about it long ago--back when everyone was still talking--but she could only ever open the pink ribbony one filled out in her mother's flawless script, the one that told how much she weighed, ate, and slept in her first year of life, that described the gymnastics and dance classes she took, the words she babbled before she was five. Continue reading at Elle
Roberto Saviano is only 30 years old, a slight, balding man of average height. There's a hipster edge to him, his black clothes, three thick silver rings, a cool day's growth of beard. He is young, famous and easy on the eyes, an Italian superstar. Continue Reading at The Huffington Post
In a hilltop suburb South of Jerusalem called Efrat, Sharon Katz serves a neat plate of sliced cake inside her five-bedroom house, surrounded by pomegranate, olive and citrus trees that she planted herself. She glances out the window at the hills where, she believes, David and Abraham once walked. "We are living in the biblical heartland," she sighs. Continue reading at Time
Amanda Knox has finally spoken. Ever since the 21-year-old American student was arrested in Italy in late 2007 and charged with the grisly murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher, tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic have bubbled with scandal and speculation. Was she, as Italian and British reports suggest, a promiscuous party girl who lived like a slob and took strange men back to the house? Did she, as Italian prosecutors allege, cut Kercher's throat after she refused to take part in group sex with Knox; Knox's boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito; and Rudy Guede, an Ivoirian now serving a 30-year prison sentence for the murder? Or was Knox, as friends and family in Seattle insist, a hardworking honors student railroaded by incompetent and overzealous police work? Testifying on June 12 for the first time, Knox fought back in her own words, claiming that she had been bullied into making a false confession, accusing Italian police of abusing her and insisting she was sleeping at Sollecito's at the time of the attack. Continue reading at Time
Standing with his video camera at the Auckland, New Zealand, airport in February 2004, Mike Nyberg watched the adoption agency worker lead in a saucer-eyed 4-year-old wearing a dirty blue dress and clutching a rubber ball. She was crying, but that didn't surprise the adoptive father in light of the heartbreaking story the agency had told him and his wife--that the girl had been abandoned by her destitute parents in Samoa and left in an orphanage. Under the circumstances, "there's not a child on the planet that wouldn't act this way," Mike recalls thinking. Still, he noticed, as she wept, she repeated a single word: "Tupu." Continue reading at People
If the 300,000 West Bank settlers identified by the U.S. President as an obstacle to Middle East peace were expecting Bibi Netanyahu to support their cherished dream of an Israel stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, they were disappointed on Sunday night. The right-wing leader instead took a sharp and unexpected lurch to the center and said he would support a two-state solution, meaning something called Palestine is a step closer to being inked onto their 3,000-year-old biblical map. Continue reading at Time
The Florida sky is just turning pink outside the new beige stucco house, and Staff Sgt. Russ Marek and his father, Paul, have already been awake for an hour. Paul has hauled his 37-year-old son out of bed, attached his prosthetic arm and leg and helped him shave. Leaning on a walker, Russ makes his way into the kitchen. He tucks into a bowl of bran flakes, then scratches his neck with his prosthetic hand while glancing at the morning paper. "I missed a spot shaving this morning," says Paul, 64, leaning in to examine his son's neck. "I've got to get you some lotion." Continue reading at People
As a teen, LaVon Bracy helped desegregate her high school in Gainesville, Fla., where she endured verbal abuse and a physical assault. "I went through the entire year not having one person ever speak to me," says Bracy (center, with, from left, Alfray Moore, husband Randolph Jr., son Randolph III and daughter LaVon). "If I went to the library, it immediately emptied." So what does Obama's inauguration mean to her? "I think Jan. 20 makes me heal just a little bit more. I did not feel it would happen in my lifetime." Continue reading at People
Pamela Davis, blond suburban mother of three, was told that her bra would be the best place to wear the wire that kick-started a long investigation into Chicago graft and that ultimately caught the governor of Illinois trying to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat. Davis is the president and C.E.O. of Edward Hospital, in Naperville, Illinois. She is proud of the fact that on her twenty-year watch the hospital has grown from a hundred-and-sixty-two-bed community facility to a four-hundred-and-twenty-seven-bed regional medical center that leads the county in babies delivered Continue reading at The New Yorker
Sarah Van Zanten, 15, was lying on the floor, an ice pack on her aching ribs. For a moment, she had no idea where she was; then her boyfriend's face came into focus. They were at a party, and Joe (not his real name), the cute football player she'd been dating, had kicked her, hard, propelling her into a wall, where she had hit her head and blacked out. "I woke up and he was hovering over me," Sarah, now 18, recalls. "I just wanted to get away." Continue reading at People
Montgomery McFate, senior adviser to the Department of Defense in a controversial effort toput anthropologists in the service of national security, long ago went undercover. This former California-hardcore-punk-scene denizen's only nod to that past life is her tightly cropped dyedblonde hair. The pantsuits McFate now wears could easily be from Hillary Clinton's closet, and she has gold studs, not safety pins, in her ears.
I don't know when I decided to invite my mother along. The mere fact that I was seriously considering it felt as though it were proof of incipient middle age. I used to travel to exotic places to get away from my family
There were obvious difficulties to making my plan work. Arthritic knees were slowing her down. She was deeply afraid of flying. My mother had flown to New York from Chicago, where she lives, on the night my son was born, but for all subsequent visits, she chose two pungent days on Amtrak instead of two white-knuckled hours in the air. What's more, I could not imagine spending almost three weeks with her. Just the two of us. In a hot Islamic country, post 9/11, post-American invasion of Iraq.
Lying in bed, Judy Mays ran her hand over her stomach, trying to soothe the pain. In the four months since her son was delivered by cesarean section, nearly every morning had started the same way: She'd take a few deep breaths and slowly roll herself off the bed sideways onto the floor, wincing as if stabbed in the abdomen. This day, however, as she touched her belly, she felt a hard, softball-sized lump in her lower abdomen. It seemed to have emerged overnight. Continue Reading at Self
As she settles into her latest role as comforter-in-chief, the president's wife recalls how she heard the news and describes how her life has changed
For first lady laura bush, the morning of september 11 started out just like any other day at the White House. She got up early. There were her two dogs, Barney, a frisky black terrier, and Spot, an English springer spaniel, to walk, meetings to attend and senators to see. The president was out the big doors first, catching Air Force One for a day trip to an elementary school in Florida. Soon after, the in-laws, former President George Bush and former First Lady Barbara Bush, who had spent Monday night at the White House, hopped a private jet to Minnesota for a political speech.
"Lose weight now ask me how." That is the slogan you see on the buttons worn by the late Mark Hughes's Herbalife family. And on the May morning that Hughes was found unconscious in his black bikini briefs, the multimillionaire messiah of diet drugs and dreams was, indeed, slim and trim. In fact, according to the Los Angeles County coroner's office, the strong, healthy, somewhat macho man with chiseled features and Hollywood teeth had the arteries of an 18-year-old.
Like a certain President of the United States, Dr. Barbara Battalino was caught lying about sex in a civil case. Unlike Bill Clinton, she lost her job immediately, served time for perjury, and became a darling of the right wing.
To find a perjury case like the President's, the seeker must dive into a rabbit hole where the characters are fun-house-mirror versions of the ones we have come to know and love. Down this hole, just as in Washington, logic and reason are bent by lies, bureaucratic jargon, and possibly, personality disorders.
For several years, I was tethered to Bill Clinton on pool duty, in which reporters from national magazines and newspapers take turns traveling with the president. I had done it so often, Air Force One almost bored me, with all that windy waiting on the tarmac, Clinton's practiced wave on the steps, the Secret Service men shoving and glaring at us through their mirrored lenses.
Author
Clockwise from top: Unholy Business; Mirage; A Very Private Woman; The Fatal Gift of Beauty