Articles by Suzanne Fields
The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan caught the decline of the culture two decades ago, observing that we're "defining deviancy down" - lowering the bar for what was once considered deviant behavior, giving a pass to things society once scorned. Not much has changed over 20 years. The senator was talking mostly about criminal behavior, but it applies now to just about everything. Raunchy, obscene and scatological subjects, once taboo, are the stuff of prime time.
Published
May 18, 2011
Shares The line between life and death is always a thin one and never more so - literally and symbolically - than in the tiny state of Israel, which celebrates its 63rd birthday this week. (That's a lot of bar mitzvahs.) No sooner had the sirens sounded across the promised land of milk and honey, marking memorial day for the soldiers who have died fighting for Israel's survival, than fireworks splashed across the heavens, recalling that moment in 1948 when Israel declared its independence. The two commemorations are not unrelated.
Published
May 11, 2011
Shares What a weekend. A wedding and a funeral. Love and war. A duchess anointed, a terrorist assassinated. It's the stuff of epics: Of arms and the lady we sing. Of Navy SEALs and British nuptials, firefights and flower girls, warriors brave and kisses sealed. Rejoicing takes place after nine years of courtship, 10 years of searching. Celebration follows rejuvenation.
Published
May 4, 2011
Shares Angela Merkel's Germany is losing its edge politically as her party suffers setbacks in local elections and is sidetracked by France's assertion of leadership toward the Arab Spring. Culturally and intellectually, however, Berlin is still the European capital pushing the envelope. Berlin drives the engine for thinking and rethinking Germany's past.
Published
April 28, 2011
Shares Our British and European cousins are wrestling with a problem we don't have - yet. How far can the state go to require religious beliefs to conform to basic law? You don't have to be a civil libertarian to feel a chill down your back in even putting the dilemma in such blunt terms.
Published
April 20, 2011
Shares Nancy Pelosi was howlin' mad, eager to lead the charge on behalf of women everywhere (whether they wanted her to or not) against the Republican congressional regiments "at war with women." She sees a battlefield littered with bloody female bodies.
Published
April 13, 2011
Shares The college acceptance letters have landed. Hysterics have subsided. No more tearful sessions of "what if?" Parents have come to terms with their disappointments that their achieving, well-adjusted child didn't get into her first choice because she had only an A-minus average, good but not great SAT scores, and was merely a reporter for the school newspaper. She may be able to recite the Gettysburg Address from memory, and read all of "Moby Dick" (including the whale blubber descriptions), but that simply wasn't enough.
Published
April 6, 2011
Shares Revolutions are always unpredictable, depending on the way always unpredictable people adapt to them. That's true of high-tech revolutions as well as revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and a lot of other places. Humans are curious creatures.
Published
March 30, 2011
Shares Many Americans were disappointed when President Obama devoted a Saturday radio address to a celebration of the progress of women in society. Most of us were more interested to hear about the progress (or lack of it) in dealing with the crisis that threatens to become a new war in Libya. The president was excited about a new White House report on the status of women, the first such report in 48 years. John F. Kennedy assigned Eleanor Roosevelt to explore the subject on that occasion.
Published
March 24, 2011
Shares Conservatives love to hate Frank Rich, the New York Times columnist who wrote his last political column on Sunday, but they owe him an accolade or two for recognizing what the relentless production of opinion was doing to his writing. (Other pundits, please copy.) "That routine can push you to have stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions about subjects you may not care deeply about, or to run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambitious conclusion," he wrote in his farewell to rage and all that. He's moving to fresh adventures at New York magazine, where he hopes to rediscover nuance, which he displayed in thoughtful abundance in "Ghost Light," his memoir about growing up in Washington, D.C.
Published
March 16, 2011
Shares Tina Brown wanted to create a big splash with the first issue of the "new" Newsweek - the magazine Sidney Harman bought for a dollar and put her in charge of returning it to relevance. What could be more original than putting a fresh face on the cover? So here's Hillary Rodham Clinton, 11 years older than the last time Tina Brown launched a magazine, called Talk, and put her there.
Published
March 9, 2011
Shares If teachers unions would use their collective-bargaining rights to do good for their students rather than doing well for themselves, they could make a stronger case for themselves. The good teachers, if they provide a little evidence, might even make a credible argument for getting paid more money. But no. They're talking "me, me, me."
Published
March 2, 2011
Shares "If you want to send a message," Samuel Goldwyn famously told his screenwriters, "go to Western Union." He was determined that his movies would be about entertainment, not politics. Now you would have better luck trying to send a message by Pony Express because the telegram has gone the way of buggy whips and high-button shoes. But via cell phone, e-mail or Twitter, the old movie mogul's point is still a valid caution.
Published
February 23, 2011
Shares It's not easy to perfect a formula to encourage human aspiration, but two very different women in the headlines think they've done it. Lady Gaga, who just won a Grammy for best female pop vocal performance, and the Tiger Mother, whose controversial book on "parenting" became an instant best-seller, are cut from the same cloth to make a splashy costume. Both have cleverly manufactured a personal story, sensationalized its message and packaged it in a way that sells to the insecure, the overanxious and the ill at ease. Superstar meets supermom.
Published
February 16, 2011
Shares Democracy is more than a word. The protesting Egyptians and the watching world are learning that between the Egyptian army and the Muslim Brotherhood there's a lot to overcome. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton got one thing right: "It needs to be an orderly, peaceful transition to real democracy, not faux democracy."
Published
February 9, 2011
Shares We're moving swiftly into postliterate America, and more's the pity. Many of us can't write a coherent, straightforward, easy-to-read sentence. Nobody but a "tiger mother" seems interested in teaching her cubs how to write clearly.
Published
February 3, 2011
Shares Rep. Michele Bachmann, founder of the Tea Party caucus in the new Congress, gave more than a response to President Obama's State of the Union speech Tuesday night. She gave us a look at the new political woman in Washington.
Published
January 26, 2011
Shares 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
Shares 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
Shares 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
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