FIELDS: Would James Madison play video games?
If we've learned one lesson from the massacre in Tucson, Ariz., it's that cause and effect are poor guides to explain human behavior. Published January 20, 2011
Suzanne Fields
Articles by Suzanne Fields
FIELDS: Changing how we think
We mourn, we weep, we wonder why. How could such things happen? Smart phones and online libraries constantly feed us information, but we don't get any wiser. We blame others for what goes wrong and for what we don't fully understand. Pundits argue and provoke, pretending to seek wisdom from the dialectic, but they're merely in love with the sound of their own voices. Jeremiahs predict the worst, Pollyannas foresee a rosy future and the ostrich buries his head in the sand (where insights as wise as any other may lurk). Published January 13, 2011
FIELDS: Boomers back to the future
The baby boomers who wouldn't trust anyone over 30 must now rely on young clerks to get their Social Security and Medicare checks in the mail. This is the year the first of millions of boomers turn 65, and their younger brothers and sisters will follow them in the next two decades at the rate of 10,000 a day. Published January 5, 2011
FIELDS: 'True Grit' redux
"True Grit" is a tale whose time came and went. It's the good fortune of a new generation that its time has come again. The novel by Charles Portis, which sold about 25,000 copies from 2007 through 2009, has been bought by 10,000 additional readers since a new version of the movie based on it opened this month. Published December 29, 2010
FIELDS: Snow on Hitler's parade
Berlin, Paris and London lie becalmed beneath a blanket of winter white. People come and go talking only of snow, snow, snow. They're obsessed with the weather, as if their winters are usually balmy seasons of sunshine and warmth. They've forgotten, if only for a fortnight or so, fears of terrorism and anger over intimate pat-downs. Tourists are furious over canceled flig Published December 22, 2010
FIELDS: Keeping the Continent afloat
"Money, money, money makes the world go round, the world go round." Joel Gray and Liza Minnelli sang it loud and clear in the movie "Cabaret," based on Christopher Isherwood's tales of the high life among the lowlife in Berlin of the early 1930s. Today, they might change the lyrics to "Euro, euro, euro." But no one here suggests the euro is making the world go round. Published December 15, 2010
FIELDS: Hillary's unexpected good fortune
There are villains aplenty in the WikiLeaks scandal, but nobody looks better for it than Hillary Clinton. The purloined State Department cables show the secretary of state to be eager and willing to man up to both the nation's enemies and its faithless "allies" in the Middle East. Published December 9, 2010
FIELDS: Cultivating homegrown terror
"Homegrown" promises something fresh and tasty when applied to tomatoes, cabbage and beans straight from the farmer's field. But about terrorism, not so much. Homegrown terrorists, recruited from newly arrived people from the Muslim countries of the Middle East and Africa, are the latest menace to America. They're new transplants to these shores and sometimes even the native born. Published December 1, 2010
FIELDS: Counting our mixed blessings
The Thanksgiving holiday offers mixed blessings that run from anxiety to celebration. When the different generations gather to mix memory with desire (as the poet sayeth) we recognize differences as well as affinities, angry feelings along with the affectionate. We hasten and chasten our will to make known. Published November 24, 2010
FIELDS: No dancing on the left
Radical feminists are fussy, as usual, and now they're fidgety, too. They don't know how to enjoy success. They're restless, like combat veterans who, having returned home to peace, keep fighting old battles. Published November 18, 2010
FIELDS: Nancy, Nancy, Nancy
Happy politicians are all alike; every unhappy politician is unhappy in his own way. (Apologies to Tolstoy.) Nancy Pelosi, who in her heart of hearts must be unhappy about Nov. 2, insists publicly that the disaster was an occasion for the losers to celebrate. Published November 10, 2010
FIELDS: A problem of reality, not rhetoric
Let's raise a cup o' cheer for robust, aggressive debate, especially for a democracy in an election campaign. Truth will out. Sometimes it takes awhile, but determined voters can find out what they need to know from many voices, even when the voices are raised (or especially when they're raised.) The voter, often dismissed by the intelligentsia as dumb and unrefined, knows how to select and separate the wheat from the chaff. This week, he left a lot of chaff on the wind. Published November 3, 2010
FIELDS: Politics looks sinister to the left
Spooky election campaigns jump-start Halloween this year. Christine O'Donnell, a Republican from the Tea Party running for a Senate seat from Delaware, is looking for a metered space to park her broomstick. "That's the kind of candidate Delaware hasn't had since 1694," cracked a player on "Saturday Night Live" as a skeleton in the background played the piano with bony fingers. Published October 28, 2010
FIELDS:High heels and high hopes
Maybe the radical feminists deserve a little pity, or at least a bit of tea and sympathy. Some of them are still living among "Mad Men." That television soap opera of the manners and mores of Madison Avenue in the 1960s ended its fourth season this week with a Freudian treatment of conventional male fantasy. Don Draper, the top dog at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce asks his secretary, who has shown mothering instincts baby-sitting his children on a vacation trip to California, to marry him. The most creative woman in the ad agency, who saved the firm by landing a lucrative account for pantyhose, is simply a sad single woman without a man. Published October 20, 2010
FIELDS: Paging Clark Kent
Education, like politics, is local. You want it close to home, the better to monitor it. That's how it should be. What and how to teach kids, like politics, is subject to the changes of clout, even when it hurts the kids. That's not how it should be, but that's how it was in Washington, where a mayor stood behind an innovative leader in education who took on the powerful teachers union, daring to fire poor teachers, to ignore tenure when teachers underperformed and to dismiss principals of chronically underperforming schools. When the mayor lost an election, the innovative leader was out, too. Published October 13, 2010
FIELDS: Dorky digital and 'the new cool'
Every generation seeks a hero or an anti-hero, a trend or countertrend, a fashion or non-fashion to define itself in both politics and the culture, pop and otherwise. Recall Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock in the movie "The Graduate," lolling about in his parents' swimming pool, fins and all, with no place to go. Quintessential '60s. Published October 7, 2010
FIELDS: 'Money Never Sleeps' misses the mark
Conservatives who love hating moviemaker Oliver Stone - one who has never found a particular reason to love America - won't find enough venom to abet their passion against him during his latest movie, "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps." He has gone soft, mushy and sentimental. Published September 29, 2010
FIELDS: Arranging the tea leaves
What do women want? That was Sigmund Freud's endearing, if naive, question, asked when "Freudian" still meant a deep look into the unconscious. But the good Viennese doctor, as we've learned since, had not a clue to what he was talking about. He posed various notions like envy of you-know-what, that anatomy is destiny. Some were cute, but no cigar. Published September 22, 2010
FIELDS: The view beyond Ground Zero
New York, New York, a wonderful town. The city is a study in "doubleness." The subway runs deep, the buildings scrape the sky. There's an east side and a west side, an uptown and a downtown, two rivers, two coastlines. Published September 16, 2010
FIELDS: American tolerance and Islam at odds
Summer fades into autumn, and with it comes the seasonal focus on ancient faith. Muslims fast for Ramadan, seeking mercy and forgiveness, closing the last day of the observance with prayer and celebration on Eid al-Fitr. Jews blow the shofar, with its piercing cry ringing in the New Year, first with the celebration of Rosh Hashanah, when we nibble apples dipped in honey, hoping for sweetness in the days ahead, and then the solemn fasting on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Published September 9, 2010
