Suzanne Fields

FIELDS: Hearts and flowers for Hillary

Hillary Rodham Clinton got an early valentine from President Obama, leaving Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to celebrate Groundhog Day alone. Perhaps the veep sees a shadow already (you can't blame him for looking over his shoulder), and he'll burrow underground.

January 31, 2013

FIELDS: Diversity with conceit

The diversity warriors, with no sense of humor and short on irony, keep looking for victims in all the old places.

January 24, 2013

FIELDS: Pricking the academic bloat

The last of the college applications have been rewritten, tweaked and polished and at last entrusted to the tender mercies of the U.S. mail or the Internet.

January 17, 2013

FIELDS: Poetry on the Potomac

A poet laureate comes to Washington. Yawn. In the world capital of the sound and fury that often signifies not very much, the disciplined sentiments of a poet sound as alien as a tax cut for millionaires.

January 10, 2013

FIELDS: Looking back, then facing the future

The pagan god Janus has two faces and that's a good thing. He can look to the future and reflect on the past all at the same time.

January 2, 2013

FIELDS: Faking it in art and politics

Here's a resolution for one and all as we slide down the fiscal cliff (or not): Beware of fakery in popular places. Fakery, particularly in culture both high and low, bubbles up from the media, affecting the way we see everything, even, for example, politics.

December 26, 2012

FIELDS: Illumination from medieval manuscripts

It hasn't been an easy year, decade or early century for organized religion. Books by atheists proliferate, some meaner than others. Fewer men and women attend church or synagogue services.

December 19, 2012

FIELDS: ‘Insourcing’ to America

The prospect of hanging, as Samuel Johnson observed, "concentrates the mind wonderfully." We're counting on that kind of concentration to keep us from falling off the infamous "fiscal cliff."

December 12, 2012

FIELDS: Tying the knot with Big Daddy

My son, age 42, finally married. His bride walked down a red carpet with rose petals scattered by his 8-year-old twin nieces to join a cantor who sang the Jewish blessings under a chuppah, a canopy held by a man on each corner, in a quasi-traditional wedding ceremony.

December 5, 2012

FIELDS: Lincoln re-examined

Every schoolchild with enough smarts and curiosity to get beyond the latest "Call of Duty" video game ought to go see the movie "Lincoln," and check out the references and his own attention span. It requires patience, but it shows through dramatic action how a self-taught rustic from the deep backwoods had the emotional and intellectual discipline to overcome poverty and grow up to be a president to rank among the greatest.

November 28, 2012

FIELDS: Big data becomes Big Daddy

Every four years the seating arrangement at the Thanksgiving table becomes especially sensitive. The presidential election is recent history, but putting space between winners and losers can be crucial.

November 21, 2012

FIELDS: ‘Of Arms and the Man’

If Shakespeare were still with us, he would have found his Othello. Gen. David H. Petraeus is not the darkly handsome Moor of the Bard's tale, but a highly decorated officer of pallor, a nerdy-looking guy with a comb-over, but like the Moor he fuses monumental courage with human frailty. Public stature often stands on clay feet. It's the rest of us who put the marble sculpture of celebrity on its pedestal.

November 14, 2012

FIELDS: Winning campaign advice

"How to Win an Election" is a little primer, published by Princeton University Press, that flew out of bookstores just in time for Tuesday's election. The bright red cover reminded some older purchasers of Chairman Mao's famous "little red book" of a generation ago. Several hundred copies seem to have found their way to President Obama's election headquarters in Chicago.

November 7, 2012

FIELDS: Obama’s vulgar sexual politics

More than a century and a half ago, when early suffragettes fought to win the vote, they campaigned for equality as a source of independence and dignity, a means for a woman to stand equally with a man. The vote would uphold a woman's capacity to be fully human under the law, and from the law the culture would change.

October 31, 2012

FIELDS: Rumbling toward a knockout

Reporters and pundits writing about politics and particularly presidential debates can't resist the metaphors of the ring. Why should they? The metaphors work.

October 24, 2012

FIELDS: Women see for whom the buck stops

There's a new woman voter out there. Empowered women are holding themselves to the same standard they hold men to, and it's showing up in the public opinion polls. Female concerns over the debt and the deficit, not the usual gender issues, have dramatically increased as the Nov. 6 election bears down upon us.

October 17, 2012

FIELDS: Immorality of feeding Big Bird

For an 8-footer with a lot of yellow feathers and a bird's brain, Big Bird is a fellow with a lot of friends in medium-high places. President Obama even has commissioned a campaign commercial taking Mitt Romney to task for treating the bird with something less than reverence.

October 10, 2012

FIELDS: Obama and Romney enter the ring

When you write about war, Barbara Tuchman once told aspiring historians, write as though you don't know who won. That's hard to do. It's just as hard to write about which presidential candidate will win a tight race.

October 3, 2012

FIELDS: Bumps in Obama’s Mideast road

This is the week of Yom Kippur, when Jews reflect on the year just past and look forward to the new one in hopes of being entered in the Book of Life. The shofar (or ram's horn) is a plaintive cry from the heart, marking natural events of birth, death and renewal.

September 26, 2012

FIELDS: Putting the lie to ‘war on women’

Certain feminists, similar to children discovering that certain words shock their mommies, like to talk dirty. Or at least naughty. Naomi Wolf climbs on this bandwagon once more with her eighth book, "Vagina: A New Biography" (Ecco, 2012).

September 19, 2012