Connecting.the.Dots

Is anyone surprised that the C.I.A. is on the ground in Libya, along with who-knows-what Special Forces, presumably to find out who the re...

A candidate will emerge from the 2012 Republican primaries only after running a gauntlet of embarrassment this year. As polls show low pub...

For those who welcomed a thoughtful, analytical, measured President after the pietistic, never-in-doubt George W. Bush, Barack Obama's l...

Patriots who revere the Founding Fathers may now be overshooting their mark by almost a century--back to the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s...

Not since the days of Iraq's mushroom clouds and smoking guns has the American air been filled with more obfuscation than now in Libya. ...

Elizabeth Taylor has died at 79 without publishing her memoirs, but that would have been redundant. Everything about her, from the age of t...

As the new law turns one, the occasion recalls a greeting purportedly sent to a company president after surgery, "The Board of Directo...

As usual, the air is filled with sounds but nobody is saying much. In this era of certainty about everything, Libya has exposed the soft und...

George W. Bush, who gave up binge drinking for piety and power, knew more about mornings-after than his successor now reeling from the after...

If a dead tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear it? Those who have spent a lifetime (75 years in my case) with the New York Times , f...

As our planes and missiles bomb Libya , we are back 200 years to the first foreign military action in American history, commemorated in the ...

The Colin Powell warning about Iraq ("You break it, you own it") is now evolving into a reverse version for Libya. But if we fix t...

An image arrives, the cover of a new book in French showing American icon Marilyn Monroe 56 years ago in a legendary Irish saloon, a conver...

He keeps reminding us how lucky we were that he lost in 2008. Now John McCain gets into a more-warlike-than-thou exchange with the Afghan W...

Half a century ago, Americans feared atomic weapons of a nation that long longer exists, the Soviet Union, and its potential to destroy us. ...

"Dying is easy, comedy is hard" goes the old saying. Even while Stewart, Colbert and SNL struggle, politics are making parody impo...

What a difference 66 years makes! In 1945, the Japanese homeland was devastated, not by Nature, by my country dropping atomic bombs to save ...

The illusion of human control yields another metaphor as President Obama enters a press conference after learning about the disaster in Japa...

Writing a book is like any act of indecent exposure: You can enjoy doing it, but sooner or later, may be punished, as David Brooks is disco...

The overloaded mind reels to keep up with Scott Walker, Peter King and Muammar Qaddafi, the Three Stooges of this news cycle producing headl...