By Naomi Wolf NEW YORK: What does the New Year hold for the global wave of protest that erupted in 2011? Did the surge of anger that began in Tunisia crest in lower Manhattan, or is 2012 likely to see an escalation of the politics of dissent? The answers are alarming but quite predictable: we are …
By Naomi Wolf NEW YORK: As turmoil stalks America’s financial markets and protests fill its streets, Americans’ lifestyle choices are evolving in a telling way: once seen by the rest of the world as an exuberant teenager — the globe’s extrovert, exporter of rock ’n’ roll and flashy Hollywood movies — Americans are now becoming decidedly …
By Naomi Wolf NEW YORK: America’s politicians, it seems, have had their fill of democracy. Across the country, police, acting under orders from local officials, are breaking up protest encampments set up by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement — sometimes with shocking and utterly gratuitous violence. In the worst incident so far, hundreds …
By Naomi Wolf OXFORD: The top and the bottom of the list of countries in Newsweek’s recent cover story, “The 2011 Global Women’s Progress Report,” evoke images of two different worlds. At the top of the list — the “Best Places to be a Woman” — we see the usual suspects: Iceland and the Scandinavian countries, …
By Naomi Wolf NEW YORK: As I listen to the news coming out of England after the recent wave of urban riots — and as I read Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s compelling new biography of Charles Dickens, “Becoming Dickens” — life and art seem to be echoing each other. In the wake of the riots, British Prime Minister …
by Naomi Wolf NEW YORK: It is obvious that the left and the media establishment in the United States cannot fully understand the popular appeal of the two Republican tigresses in the news — first Sarah Palin, and now, as she consolidates her status as a Republican presidential front-runner, Michele Bachmann. What do they have that …
By Naomi Wolf NEW YORK: It is hard to ignore how many highly visible men in recent years (indeed, months) have behaved in sexually self-destructive ways. Some powerful men have long been sexually voracious; unlike today, though, they were far more discreet and generally used much better judgment in order to cover their tracks. Of …
By Naomi Wolf NEW YORK: As Swedish prosecutors’ sex-crime allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange play out in the international media, one convention of the coverage merits serious scrutiny. We know Assange by name. But his accusers — the two Swedish women who have brought the complaints against him — are consistently identified only as “Miss …
By Naomi Wolf OXFORD: Just when it seemed that America’s “Homeland Security state” could not get more surreal, the United States Transportation Security Administration has rolled out a costly Scylla and Charybdis at major airports: either you accept dangerous doses of radiation and high-resolution imaging of your naked body, or, worried about the health risks of …
