Suzanne Fields

FIELDS: Corruption and correction

It's the season of "Pomp and Circumstance," flavored with dashes of parental pride, as a rising generation in cap and gown marches solemnly into its future.

June 13, 2013

FIELDS: Working moms and unemployed dads

Between the baby boomers on one hand and Generations X, Y and Z on the other, cultural and economic changes have transformed the landscape of the culture. It's difficult to wrap a description around what sociologists call a "cohort."

June 6, 2013

FIELDS: Coaching Lolita

Lolita was 12 years old when Humbert Humbert first saw her with an obsession that could fill a book. "Lolita" became a best-selling novel about a perverted older man, a pubescent girl and a tragic tale of sexual abuse, dissected with the insights and illuminations of a brilliant writer.

May 30, 2013

FIELDS: Barack Obama as the Great Gatsby

Washington is a one-industry town. The nation's capital has wonderful art museums, concerts and theaters, but they're only supplements to the big story playing out on the front pages - always the government.

May 23, 2013

FIELDS: Paying for the new psychiatry

Psychiatry has always been the troubled child at the table of medical specialists. Psychiatric labels are based on deviations of "normal," which change with trends in moral and intellectual attitudes. Sometimes politics redefine abnormal into the new normal.

May 16, 2013

FIELDS: Discovering a mother’s mystique

Mother's Day approaches, and children are decorating cards with ribbons and lace and wrapping boxes of chocolates. Just how we celebrate depends on the length of our memories.

May 9, 2013

FIELDS: Revisiting hatred of the Jews

Awit, surveying Washington's monuments, once diagnosed the nation's capital as suffering an "edifice complex." The city's vast array of monumental buildings, housing the three branches of government, honoring the founders and heroes of the republic and housing extraordinary temples of fine art, science, technology and history, could give an overwhelmed visitor that impression.

May 2, 2013

FIELDS: When rhetoric hides the reality

Between the tragedy over loss of life and limb in Boston and the rejoicing in the certainty that two young men will not strike again, there is a large space for reflection. Emotion clouds reason, which is why we live by the rule of law.

April 25, 2013

FIELDS: Deep in the shallows of the ‘60s

"Mad Men" is back, the cultural phenomenon with a loyal audience after a 10-month hiatus. It returned with 3.4 million viewers, its second-highest rating and is again getting so much intellectual attention you might think it was "War and Peace."

April 18, 2013

New whine in old battles

Some feminists are exposing their herd mentality, and it isn't pretty.

April 11, 2013

FIELDS: New whine in old battles

Some feminists are exposing their herd mentality, and it isn’t pretty.

April 11, 2013

FIELDS: ‘The Jew in the Box’

"Art" can smooth the rough edges of life, nurturing beauty and imagination and showing a different and provocative way of looking at the world, but artists — and museums and galleries that show their work — are sometimes surprised by the hostile reception their works provoke.

April 4, 2013

FIELDS: Taking swipes at the smartphone generation

The digital age continues to confuse and confound a generation of adults who have learned to participate in it, but lack the ability for what Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley called "doin' what comes naturally."

March 28, 2013

FIELDS: When not tying the knot is not good

We pay outsized attention to women at the top, about whether they lean in or lean back, act like men or even like women. After decades of feminism telling women they can control their own destiny, scoring a seat on the fast-moving monorail to success is finally possible.

March 21, 2013

FIELDS: ‘Leaning in’ to score a room at the top

Fifty years ago, Betty Friedan described the suburban woman as the unhappy housewife. She lacked challenging choices. Her abilities and identities were attached to her kitchen.

March 14, 2013

FIELDS: Words are power

Everyone's looking for a quick fix in education -- President Obama most of all. "Let's make sure none of our children start out the race of life already a step behind," he says. "Let's make it a national priority to give every child access to high quality early education."

March 7, 2013

FIELDS: A glamorous night with the sharks

Conservatives usually have a few bones to pick with Hollywood over the Academy Awards. Not content with merely opening it, Hollywood pushes the envelope, often with questionable taste and mockery of common values.

February 28, 2013

FIELDS: Genderfication of adolescence

Not so long ago "gender" was something mostly of interest to flirtatious nouns, but then, as the culture became both more vulgar and more squeamish, "gender" replaced "sex" as the distinction between "him" and "her." Now "date," which described how him and her got acquainted, is replaced by "hook-up."

February 21, 2013