When The Times’s Israel correspondent Isabel Kershner recently asked an Israeli army tank driver, Shai Levy, 37, to describe the purpose of the looming Israeli invasion of Gaza, he said something that really caught my ear. It was “to restore honor to Israel,” ... More »
Throughout this horrible week, my mind has repeatedly flashed back to Dec. 23, 2000. That was the day the Palestinians were offered a path to having their own nation on roughly 95 percent of the land in the West Bank and 100 percent of the land in the Gaza Str... More »
I’m as fierce a dog lover as you’re likely to find, and I believe — scratch that, I know — that my own dog, Regan, is perfect. I don’t take kindly to suggestions otherwise, and a part of me can’t believe that any inconvenience she might pose to someone else ma... More »
Respiratory syncytial virus, or R.S.V., is a nasty bug. It’s the leading cause of hospitalizations among American infants and results in thousands of deaths among the elderly each year.So earlier this year, after the Food and Drug Administration approved two v... More »
The blond glamour girl and the sports superstar were doomed from the start.The galaxy exploded when Marilyn Monroe, sex goddess, and Joe DiMaggio, Joltin’ Joe, married at City Hall in San Francisco on Jan. 14, 1954. Sequins at bat.I have a black-and-white shot... More »
Nearly two decades ago, I tried to write a group biography about the senators whose offices happened to be on the second floor of the Russell Office Building on Capitol Hill. The group included John McCain, Joe Biden, Lindsey Graham and Chuck Hagel. I got to k... More »
This week, Donald Trump delivered his version of a sad tiny desk performance, hunched over the defendant’s table in a New York courtroom, diminished and watching the illusion of power and grandeur he has sold voters thin and run like oil in a hot pan.He insist... More »
WASHINGTON — I’ve always said that the Washington Monument is an apt symbol, a Freudian obelisk redolent of all the male egos that have shaped our capital.To appreciate what Dianne Feinstein accomplished, you need to know how male this city was in 1992, when s... More »
Ever since debt was invented in ancient Sumer, there have probably been people enriching themselves through bad investments. The trick is to make these investments using other people’s money.Suppose, for example, that a wheeler-dealer uses borrowed funds to ma... More »
Fifty years ago, reviewing Toni Morrison’s novel “Sula” in this newspaper, a critic wrote that Morrison was “far too talented to remain only a marvelous recorder of the Black side of provincial American life”; that to “maintain the large and serious audience s... More »
In his biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow writes that Hamilton “always had to fight the residual sadness of the driven man.” That sentence has stayed with me because I’ve also noticed that there can be something sad about extremely ambitious people —... More »
A Pew Research Center report released this week called Americans’ views of our politics “dismal.”That might be too kind a word.On metric after metric, the report ticked through markers of our persistent pessimism. In 1994, it says, “just 6 percent” of American... More »