Two days after the Boxing Day monster tsunamis struck, 125 Russians leaped at the opportunity to purchase "disaster discount" tickets to Thailand for a beach holiday. I AM NOT MAKING...
Canadian students in the arts and social science departments of our universities are being recruited to the hyperorthodoxies of multiculturalism, feminism, Marxism, postmodernism and...
Eighteen months ago I wanted to write a column about the creeping respectability of polygamy, but my then-editor considered the topic too far-out. And lo, look what is making headlin...
Master satirist of the American Zeitgeist Tom Wolfe has previously tackled the swarming social habitats of modern New York and Atlanta, and the cultural forces that shaped them. In h...
  It's little wonder that Palestinian terrorists have agreed to stop attacking Israel at the urging of newly elected Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. They have no choice: Isr...
Not long ago I was seated at dinner beside an Ontario family law judge. I asked what his position was on adoption equity for gays. Would he, once gay marriage was entrenched, and in keeping with our g...
I used to observe, with affectionate condescension, my father watching boxing on the little black and white TV in our leave-it-to-Beaver '50s-era den. He got right into it: jabbing, weaving, frowning,...
Like many contemporaries who saw their parents diminished by external forces, Arthur Miller railed bitterly against the random suffering imposed by capitalism Broadway theatres dimmed their marquee...
A sensational news item out of Toronto this month reports a "rising tide of parental rage." Parents are swearing at teachers in front of children, mouthing off at the school secretary or even launchin...
I await the auspicious moment my nine-month old granddaughter realizes her little wooden-paged starter books are for looking at rather than gnawing on. From there, it is but a short step to listening....
The Lawrence Summers affair just isn't going away, and its continuing presence in the news is a sad commentary on academic freedom in America.As everyone by now knows, on Jan. 14 Harvard University pr...
NEW YORK - We were to go to Hollywood Beach for our annual week of winter respite. But I had been housebound with flu for two weeks. Instead of boring sunshine, I needed cultural liveliness, and propo...
Last Sunday, Maureen Dowd lamented the dearth of women on the opinion pages of America's newspapers. She herself is the only female op-ed columnist at The New York Times. The...
Too bad Scott and Laci Peterson weren't Canadian. Had they been, the Conservatives might have felt emboldened to add a review of abortion policy to their agenda, instead of sweeping fetal rights under...
Every spring, a true Canadian's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of next year's winter coat.In Montreal, where I live, winter often starts in early November and sometimes ends only in mid-May. We like ...
Last week, 28 years after the passage of Quebec's draconian language law, Bill 101, the Supreme Court of Canada definitively ended the hopes of francophone Quebec families seeking to educate their chi...
When our children were toddlers, my husband and I planned a vacation by ourselves involving a transatlantic flight. Morbid images of downed planes and orphaned children assailed us. Since there were s...
In idle moments, I write limericks about famous writers. The challenge is to capture the broad strokes in four short lines. When Saul Bellow died last week at the age of 89, I pulled up his:Noble Saul...
From the death-saturated month of March -- Terry Schiavo and the pope 24/7 -- the media turned in April to the life cycle's happier ritual of marriage. Two weeks ago it was the nuptials of Ken and Dei...
At my age, nobody hasn't had a personal brush with cancer. If not yourself, others in your extended family or circle of friends have it or did: Some are now dead, some have undergone multiple surgerie...