War Without Myth
I met Wladyslaw Szpilman a year before he died, in his comfortable, well-appointed Warsaw home.
Chatting With Little Green Men
I have just cloned a baby. To be precise, I found some sticks and stones in my back yard, crushed them with my coffee grinder, threw them in a cauldron and added eye of newt and toe of frog.
007 in the DMZ
If you haven’t seen the new James Bond film, “Die Another Day,” and you don’t want to know what happens, stop reading here.
Santa’s Russia…
Moscow — Christmas lights twinkled throughout this city last week, and Christmas carols filled the air.
Solidarity, Iranian Style
A couple of days ago, a politician of my acquaintance received an e-mail from a student in a foreign country. Politely, the student asked if he could conduct an electronic “interview” with the politician. The politician agreed.
Teeing Up For the Wrong Cause
Perhaps it’s because I lived for 10 years in London, where professional women long ago discovered the secret of competing with men who belong to all-male eating clubs (they go to restaurants).
The Ulster Example
Are Israel and Northern Ireland similar? The short answer is no, and the reasons — religious, cultural and political — hardly need listing.
In Austria, The Fall Of an Extremist
There are few political obituaries more enjoyable to write than that of Joerg Haider, so I won’t resist the temptation: As of yesterday, Haider, the Austrian politician who came bouncing onto the political scene a few years ago wearing Spandex bicycle shorts, denouncing immigrants and spouting carefully crafted nuggets of Anschluss nostalgia, is officially a …
Russian With a Western Way
Andrew Carnegie needed a lifetime; the Rockefellers required several generations. And how long does it take nowadays to win respectability in Washington?
After the Gulag
In 1955, the Russian writer Yuri Dombrovsky returned home to Moscow after twenty-five years in Soviet camps and exile—twenty-five years “out there”—to discover that he had not, after all, been completely forgotten. He was handed a rehabilitation document, given a grudging pension, assigned a single room in a communal apartment. Although few of his works …