Suzanne Fields

Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ exposes royal opportunities, burdens

Watching "The Crown" in the reign of Trump is a trip into British nostalgia, leaving an American viewer with mixed feelings about the monarchy, the institution Americans loathed and left behind with a revolution of arms.

January 3, 2018

Generation I, technology, politics in 2017

When summing up the year now fading, the catch-all phrases that generalize a common view don't work.

December 27, 2017

How Christians and Jews connect in a season of religious holidays

'Tis the season to be merry, and this is a season when we need a little merriment. This year the passage of time between two holidays of the spirit, Hanukkah and Christmas, is a short passage, focusing attention once more on the Judeo-Christian moorings of America. Every year we honor the ways Christians and Jews appeal to what they hold in common in the exhortations of the season.

December 20, 2017

Righting the wrongs of Gropergate requires a dash of common sense

Maybe we need a fresh perspective. Everybody regards harassers as creeps. We're watching them fall on their swords of necessity and regret, as much for being caught for what they've actually done. Some of the rest of us, however, are acting a little too much like Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," knitting with contented delight as the heads of the guilty and innocent drop from the guillotine.

December 13, 2017

Elizabeth Warren draws challenger Shiva Ayyadurai in spoofy Massachusetts race

Donald Trump thinks of himself as the comedian-in-chief reprising Elizabeth Warren as the butt of his pointed political satire. To her consternation, he draws chuckles if not guffaws calling the Massachusetts senator "Pocahontas," the celebrated squaw of early American history, needling her for inventing Cherokee ancestors just to claim a diversification slot on the Harvard faculty. "Fake ancestry," he might call it.

December 6, 2017

Story of Prince Harry, Meghan Markle is a welcome relief

What a relief! Prince Harry and Meghan Markle -- young, romantic, endearing in their mythic appeal -- replace the old, aggressive harassers with paunch, thinning hair and sagging lecherous facial lines. There's happy news amidst the cheap and fake.

November 29, 2017

Asking for the Lord’s blessing on Thanksgiving

We gather together" are the three little words that set the theme for family and friends joining in the celebration of Thanksgiving. The words that follow -- "to ask the Lord's blessing" -- are not from an American hymn, but from the gratitude of an unknown author set to 16th century Dutch music. The lyrics put down roots in America as a unifier, and were particularly popular during World War II when our enemies were recognized as "wicked oppressors" and the nation was united against evil.

November 22, 2017

Dirty speech harms America’s youth

In the high-tech world of social media, where fake news thrives with the real, we've become a nation of voyeurs and eavesdroppers. Consuming the salacious is the guilty pleasure. We see and overhear a broad range of sordid comings and goings, what we used to describe quaintly as "dirty," in the vocabularies that were once reserved for private conversations between close friends, too embarrassing for general discussion.

November 15, 2017

Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment exploded by social media

Harvey Weinstein, who governed from the casting couch as the Stalinist emperor of Hollywood, is toppled now, done in by regiments of women who came forward with endless tales of malignant abuse. The man who made the movies worthy of 300 Oscar nominations, a man regarded in Hollywood as coming in "just after Steven Spielberg and right before God," may go on trial that could cost him his freedom. Rarely has success receded so swiftly.

November 8, 2017

Alex Bregman fulfills great-grandfather’s dreams

I grew up in a baseball family, enjoying Daddy's season tickets on the third-base line at Griffith Stadium. Washington's team then was the Senators -- "Washington, first in war, first in peace and last in the American League." Now Washington has a championship-caliber team, never last, and I rooted passionately this year for a Nationals-Astros World Series, and for a very personal reason.

November 1, 2017

Hillary Clinton joins Mueller investigation into Russia collusion

Nothing succeeds like success, so the conventional wisdom goes, but in politics, as a skeptic (of nearly everything) of my acquaintance is fond of reminding me, nothing recedes like success.

October 25, 2017

Rape accusations must be taken seriously but examined carefully

Everybody despises Harvey. Usually by this time in the public pursuit of a villain the scoundrel begins to attract a little undeserved sympathy. Not this time. The accusers keep on coming, with the passion of Emile Zola famously accusing the French government of hounding Alfred Dreyfus -- "J' accuse!" -- only because he was a Jew.

October 18, 2017

Harvey Weinstein’s fall stranger than fiction

What is it about these pathetic men with a paunch who imagine their looks and libidos are immortal, and think their excuse for manliness continues to attract sweet young flesh? You might ask some of the women.

October 11, 2017

Hugh Hefner death and women driving in Saudi Arabia both auger change

Hugh Hefner dies at 91 and women in Saudi Arabia get royal permission to drive a car. These two markers separated by continents and cultures, one in the West and the other in the East, dramatically reflect the changing ways men and women relate to each other.

October 4, 2017

‘Out of many, one’ now outdated in United States

Now we're "the Divided States of America." Or maybe the "Untied" States of America, with a suitable new slogan, "In Mammon We Trust." Tribalism trumps unity. Gone is the idealism of e pluribus unum, "out of many, one." The melting pot, which united us for so long by blending differences, is banished to the trash.

September 27, 2017

Angela Merkel shuns feminist label

Ambitious young men in Germany feel entitled to wonder when a man will ever be chancellor again. They, too, want a "role model."

September 20, 2017

Hillary Clinton’s book shows she is more aloof than thought

Feminist politics turned a corner with the final defeat of Hillary Clinton. You can feel it in and between the lines of her blame-game book, "What Happened." The exuberance of her supporters, which buoyed her in the campaign to elect the first woman president, has dissipated. All she has left is a memoir of an angry woman, raging that her time has passed, that the abundant fruit of opportunity that fell from the family tree was crushed beyond hopes of redemption and there's nothing left to put in a new bottle but old whine.

September 13, 2017

Safe spaces strangle academic debate

America got lost on the way to the 21st century. Many Americans lost pride in being American, and no longer cherish the rigors of the First Amendment, which gives pride of place to freedom of speech. This didn't happen in one generation, though the baby boomers, born after the soldiers came marching home in triumph in 1945, grew up nursing grievance. This led to crucial changes in attitude, and succeeding generations felt empowered by rebellion.

September 6, 2017

A superstar in Donald Trump’s Cabinet

Donald Trump has a skill for recruiting Cabinet officers he has treated badly. Serving in his administration can require selfless devotion to duty. Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, could tell you about that. So could Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is swiftly becoming the Cabinet superstar.

August 30, 2017