Suzanne Fields

FIELDS: The king vs. the geek

"If you want to send a message," Samuel Goldwyn famously told his screenwriters, "go to Western Union." He was determined that his movies would be about entertainment, not politics. Now you would have better luck trying to send a message by Pony Express because the telegram has gone the way of buggy whips and high-button shoes. But via cell phone, e-mail or Twitter, the old movie mogul's point is still a valid caution.

February 23, 2011

FIELDS: Superstar meets supermom

It's not easy to perfect a formula to encourage human aspiration, but two very different women in the headlines think they've done it. Lady Gaga, who just won a Grammy for best female pop vocal performance, and the Tiger Mother, whose controversial book on "parenting" became an instant best-seller, are cut from the same cloth to make a splashy costume. Both have cleverly manufactured a personal story, sensationalized its message and packaged it in a way that sells to the insecure, the overanxious and the ill at ease. Superstar meets supermom.

February 16, 2011

FIELDS: Not a faux democracy

Democracy is more than a word. The protesting Egyptians and the watching world are learning that between the Egyptian army and the Muslim Brotherhood there's a lot to overcome. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton got one thing right: "It needs to be an orderly, peaceful transition to real democracy, not faux democracy."

February 9, 2011

FIELDS: Good writing faces the elements

We're moving swiftly into postliterate America, and more's the pity. Many of us can't write a coherent, straightforward, easy-to-read sentence. Nobody but a "tiger mother" seems interested in teaching her cubs how to write clearly.

February 3, 2011

FIELDS: A new flavor of tea

Rep. Michele Bachmann, founder of the Tea Party caucus in the new Congress, gave more than a response to President Obama's State of the Union speech Tuesday night. She gave us a look at the new political woman in Washington.

January 26, 2011

FIELDS: Would James Madison play video games?

If we've learned one lesson from the massacre in Tucson, Ariz., it's that cause and effect are poor guides to explain human behavior.

January 20, 2011

FIELDS: Changing how we think

We mourn, we weep, we wonder why. How could such things happen? Smart phones and online libraries constantly feed us information, but we don't get any wiser. We blame others for what goes wrong and for what we don't fully understand. Pundits argue and provoke, pretending to seek wisdom from the dialectic, but they're merely in love with the sound of their own voices. Jeremiahs predict the worst, Pollyannas foresee a rosy future and the ostrich buries his head in the sand (where insights as wise as any other may lurk).

January 13, 2011

FIELDS: Boomers back to the future

The baby boomers who wouldn't trust anyone over 30 must now rely on young clerks to get their Social Security and Medicare checks in the mail. This is the year the first of millions of boomers turn 65, and their younger brothers and sisters will follow them in the next two decades at the rate of 10,000 a day.

January 5, 2011

FIELDS: ‘True Grit’ redux

"True Grit" is a tale whose time came and went. It's the good fortune of a new generation that its time has come again. The novel by Charles Portis, which sold about 25,000 copies from 2007 through 2009, has been bought by 10,000 additional readers since a new version of the movie based on it opened this month.

December 29, 2010

FIELDS: Snow on Hitler’s parade

Berlin, Paris and London lie becalmed beneath a blanket of winter white. People come and go talking only of snow, snow, snow. They're obsessed with the weather, as if their winters are usually balmy seasons of sunshine and warmth. They've forgotten, if only for a fortnight or so, fears of terrorism and anger over intimate pat-downs. Tourists are furious over canceled flig

December 22, 2010

FIELDS: Keeping the Continent afloat

"Money, money, money makes the world go round, the world go round." Joel Gray and Liza Minnelli sang it loud and clear in the movie "Cabaret," based on Christopher Isherwood's tales of the high life among the lowlife in Berlin of the early 1930s. Today, they might change the lyrics to "Euro, euro, euro." But no one here suggests the euro is making the world go round.

December 15, 2010

FIELDS: Hillary’s unexpected good fortune

There are villains aplenty in the WikiLeaks scandal, but nobody looks better for it than Hillary Clinton. The purloined State Department cables show the secretary of state to be eager and willing to man up to both the nation's enemies and its faithless "allies" in the Middle East.

December 9, 2010

FIELDS: Cultivating homegrown terror

"Homegrown" promises something fresh and tasty when applied to tomatoes, cabbage and beans straight from the farmer's field. But about terrorism, not so much. Homegrown terrorists, recruited from newly arrived people from the Muslim countries of the Middle East and Africa, are the latest menace to America. They're new transplants to these shores and sometimes even the native born.

December 1, 2010

FIELDS: Counting our mixed blessings

The Thanksgiving holiday offers mixed blessings that run from anxiety to celebration. When the different generations gather to mix memory with desire (as the poet sayeth) we recognize differences as well as affinities, angry feelings along with the affectionate. We hasten and chasten our will to make known.

November 24, 2010

FIELDS: No dancing on the left

Radical feminists are fussy, as usual, and now they're fidgety, too. They don't know how to enjoy success. They're restless, like combat veterans who, having returned home to peace, keep fighting old battles.

November 18, 2010

FIELDS: Nancy, Nancy, Nancy

Happy politicians are all alike; every unhappy politician is unhappy in his own way. (Apologies to Tolstoy.) Nancy Pelosi, who in her heart of hearts must be unhappy about Nov. 2, insists publicly that the disaster was an occasion for the losers to celebrate.

November 10, 2010

FIELDS: A problem of reality, not rhetoric

Let's raise a cup o' cheer for robust, aggressive debate, especially for a democracy in an election campaign. Truth will out. Sometimes it takes awhile, but determined voters can find out what they need to know from many voices, even when the voices are raised (or especially when they're raised.) The voter, often dismissed by the intelligentsia as dumb and unrefined, knows how to select and separate the wheat from the chaff. This week, he left a lot of chaff on the wind.

November 3, 2010

FIELDS: Politics looks sinister to the left

Spooky election campaigns jump-start Halloween this year. Christine O'Donnell, a Republican from the Tea Party running for a Senate seat from Delaware, is looking for a metered space to park her broomstick. "That's the kind of candidate Delaware hasn't had since 1694," cracked a player on "Saturday Night Live" as a skeleton in the background played the piano with bony fingers.

October 28, 2010

FIELDS:High heels and high hopes

Maybe the radical feminists deserve a little pity, or at least a bit of tea and sympathy. Some of them are still living among "Mad Men." That television soap opera of the manners and mores of Madison Avenue in the 1960s ended its fourth season this week with a Freudian treatment of conventional male fantasy. Don Draper, the top dog at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce asks his secretary, who has shown mothering instincts baby-sitting his children on a vacation trip to California, to marry him. The most creative woman in the ad agency, who saved the firm by landing a lucrative account for pantyhose, is simply a sad single woman without a man.

October 20, 2010

FIELDS: Paging Clark Kent

Education, like politics, is local. You want it close to home, the better to monitor it. That's how it should be. What and how to teach kids, like politics, is subject to the changes of clout, even when it hurts the kids. That's not how it should be, but that's how it was in Washington, where a mayor stood behind an innovative leader in education who took on the powerful teachers union, daring to fire poor teachers, to ignore tenure when teachers underperformed and to dismiss principals of chronically underperforming schools. When the mayor lost an election, the innovative leader was out, too.

October 13, 2010