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Rodi Alvarado Pena cleans houses for a living, thinks about her two children in Guatemala and waits. For six years she has been in the United States seeking asylum, watching [...]

George W. Bush and I have been on vacation at the same time, both of us in small towns shimmering in the heat, full of corn fields and, at least [...]

She seemed to have everything the times demanded, this woman of a certain age toying with her mineral water across a restaurant table. A partnership in a large law firm. [...]

I grew up in a suburb in which neighborhood was defined by parish, in which the smell of fish sticks filled the air on Friday nights and there were more [...]

So a woman walks into a pediatrician's office. She's tired, she's hot and she's been up all night throwing sheets into the washer because the smaller of her two boys [...]

When the Ad Council convened focus groups not long ago to help prepare a series of public-service announcements on child hunger, there was a fairly unanimous response from the participants [...]

When the good-old-days crowd get together over coffee in a diner, at the card table at home, one of the things they sometimes bemoan is the end of civics class [...]

Robert Pennoyer registered as a Republican in 1946. He is partial to quoting from a bronze medal given to his father to commemorate the centennial of the party, engraved with [...]

This courtroom has a disconcerting decorative duality, like a person dressed only from the waist down. The lower half of the cavernous room has glowing wood wainscoting, and the well [...]

My mother did not exfoliate. In her medicine cabinet she had a big white jar of Pond's cold cream and a big blue jar of Noxzema. That's as much care [...]

Public personification has always been the struggle on both sides of the abortion battle lines. That is why the people outside clinics on Saturday mornings carry signs with photographs of [...]

My high school graduating class had 175 students. Last year the same school had 420 seniors. This bit of biographical data comes to you by way of Charles Andrew Williams. [...]

Six people live here, in a room the size of the master bedroom in a modest suburban house. Trundles, bunk beds, dressers side by side stacked with toys, clothes, boxes, [...]

Never watched 'Survivor.' never will. what's the point? I've eaten bugs inadvertently myself, dozing in the hammock by the pond on a muggy summer evening. And anyone who wants to [...]

When my children were newborns and I was spending most of my time watching television while nursing, I saw a program with pediatrician extraordinaire T. Berry Brazelton in which he [...]

To lead a national advocacy organization requires a robust constitution and a thick skin. Long hours, hate mail, public opprobrium: it all comes with the job. At best, your work [...]

Beneath the military blue tent that the Big Apple Circus pitches each holiday season in New York City labors a man named Serge Percelly, who juggles tennis racquets. Like other [...]

Well, kids, it's sure been a wild ride in the middle schools of America these last few weeks. One moment you're studying the Rough Riders or the Tories or the [...]

As electoral events unfolded in Florida he may have felt like the most overlooked man on earth. And yet his essence is always with us. Why did the either/or of [...]

Early morning in the dining room of an elementary school, its tile walls hung with cardboard cutouts of pumpkins and Pilgrims, its air so inert that the faint suggestion of [...]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has not shared her cookie recipe with the readers of Good Housekeeping. Anthony Kennedy has yet to appear on the cover of People magazine. David Souter has [...]

The student occupation of buildings at Columbia University in 1968 remains the zenith or the nadir of all campus protests, depending on your politics. Richard Nixon (he was on the [...]

The legal right to choose to have an abortion in America has always been a kind of mirage. On Jan. 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down one of [...]

As the train hurtles through the dark of the subway tunnels, three teenagers consider aloud the events of their school day. In the fashion of adolescent boys, they seem to [...]

At last official count nearly 500 gay and lesbian couples had been united in civil unions this summer in Vermont. There were flowers, champagne, brides and brides, grooms and grooms. [...]

When they were building that overexposed bridge to the 21st century, Al Gore and Bill Clinton left the liberals behind. The old guard was resurrected for one night at the [...]

Brokaw and Bush, two guys just standing around talking. Shirtsleeves. Sunshine. Fence posts. Cameras. You get the idea. The candidate was hunkered down at the ranch, going mano a mano [...]

Imagine that millions of Americans are addicted to a lethal drug. Imagine that the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly ducked its responsibility by refusing to regulate that drug. And [...]

The next time someone talks about the narrow interests of kids today, how they attend only to the raucous cry of the computer calling across a stretch of cable to [...]

This time we got to see it. And seeing it was not pretty, at least unless you were as twisted as the men captured on the videotapes. They were on [...]

The miasma of sexual detritus that has swirled around Bill Clinton as though he were some grown-up variant of the 'Peanuts' character Pig Pen began in earnest on the national [...]

A slate roof is a humbling thing. The one we're putting on the old farmhouse is Pennsylvania blue black, and it's meant to last at least a hundred years. Jeff [...]

When Rudy Giuliani was revving up his first successful mayoral run in 1992, his wife called. Not long before, I had trashed her husband's candidacy in print, but Donna Hanover [...]

Tuesday is a neglected middle child of a day. The weekend is not in sight; the work week is neither here nor there. 'Saturday night is the loneliest night of [...]

One thing is certain: they would never have dared do this to a mother. The sad saga of Elian Gonazalez, a small boy turned into a political soap opera by [...]

Spring break in Jamaica, and the patios of the waterfront bars are so packed that it seems the crowds of students must go tumbling into the aquamarine sea, still clutching [...]

This may sound strange coming from a life-long feminist, but I've had it with Women's History Month. It's hard for me to believe that Betty Friedan wrote 'The Feminine Mystique,' [...]

Here's a riddle: why was the internationally known Princeton professor stopped for driving too slowly on a street where the speed limit was 25 miles per hour? How come a [...]

The dilemma of the modern American voter is dramatized in the 1939 film in which a lion, a scarecrow, a tin man and Judy Garland follow a yellow brick road. [...]

Dear Hillary, Love the hair. Like the house. All the best. Think you're nuts. Not nuts to move to New York, of course, which I consider the center of the [...]

By the time you read this, John Rocker could well be volunteering at an AIDS hospice, or signing baseballs at a prison, or shaking hands with little kids at a [...]

The Supreme Court was preparing to extend the evidentiary doctor-patient privilege to social workers practicing psychotherapy, and Justice Antonin Scalia was, as usual, dissenting. 'Ask the average citizen: would your [...]

History is most often written in terms of inventions and events, revolutions and revolutionary ideas. But it is always essentially the story of people. The New Deal. The new technology. [...]

Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I think it's time to retire the chicken. You remember the chicken. It showed up most conspicuously in the 1992 presidential campaign, when a [...]

The saddest phrase I've read in a long time is this one: psychological autopsy. That's what the doctors call it when a kid kills himself and they go back over [...]

A funny thing happened to me on the way to this column. I endorsed a presidential candidate. For those of you who have spent months looking at the television screen [...]

In the beginning of this year a Gallup poll asked Americans about the three most important issues facing the country. As has happened so often in the past, guns were […]

The Brooklyn Museum is closed on Tuesdays. So said the guard at the door. No wonder there were no lines, no protesters, no one handing out airsickness bags and copies [...]

I am almost 64 years old, and I have no idea if I look it. I've met women my age who have faces so baked by sunlight and braised by [...]