Marilia Duffles is a contributor to the Financial Times and the Economist. She has also written for the Globo, Brazil’s leading newspaper.
Just a block away from a recent Kasich campaign event on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., a young veteran sat on a bench in the dark shadow of the U.S. Capitol dome. Tony had lost his leg in the Iraq War, is suffering from bone cancer, and he is homeless. In my long chat with […]
In the mellifluous and colorful ballet Coppélia, a magical inventor named Dr. Coppélius makes a pretty wooden doll so life-like a young villager forsakes his true love for the doll instead. Coppélia sits lifelessly on the balcony but seems so real her maker forgets she’s a doll. He winds her up to dance and she […]
There is nothing like watching politicians utter the naked truth. So rare it defies belief. Like Cidinha Campos, the blunt Brazilian Congresswoman from Rio de Janeiro, who points the finger at the bad political apples with justified and refreshing outrage. The late Ohio Congressman Jim Traficant had nothing on her. It is worth watching Brazil’s […]
In times like these, newspaper pages are peppered with gossip swirling around the scandal. Who is the girl? Will we see more texts, more photos, more scurrilous details? Will the wife stand by her man? Blah, blah, blah and blasé. Whether it’s San Diego’s Mayor Filner, or NYC’s Wanna be Mayor Weiner — or all […]
Amongst the billions of Homo sapiens scattered across this mysterious planet of ours, there are but a few human princes. No, not the royal sort whose thin veneer of worth and dignity is inversely proportional to their lofty, worshipped position and, even more so, their banal existence. I’ve met three. The Queen of England, Princess […]
Common sense is 235 years old. Common Sense, that is: The 18th-century pamphlet by the Englishman Thomas Paine that argued beautifully for independence from British rule in just 48 pages. While this opus is still very much alive in classrooms, websites, and C-Span Television screens across the nation, the other “common sense” is very much […]
The soccer giant favored to win its sixth World Cup has lost its touch, and Brazil’s jogo bonito, that spirited and smooth choreography, is no longer the veritable samba it used to be. Watching Pelé‘s deceptive dribble of the ball was like watching the passo de samba, the stationary, speedy steps of those bronzed, glittered, […]
September 29th, 10:48 a.m. PDT. Seismologists report a substantial earthquake epicentered on the ocean floor 120 miles south of the tiny bacon-strip island of American Samoa. Within minutes the earthquake had spawned a tsunami with terrifying consequences. By 8:00 p.m. PDT, the news was shattering. Cars, homes, personal possessions were destroyed or swept away by […]
I’m wrestling with my amateur version of a great philosophical paradox: if rudeness is so pervasively commonplace throughout society, does it cease to be rudeness? It started when I went to our local bookstore this week to hear the nattily suited Howard Dean talk about his book, Howard Dean’s Prescription for Health Care Reform, and […]
I’m full of hope that the surfeit of interest in the recent New York Times piece — the ninth most emailed “Does Bo Know He’s Top Dog”? — will shift over with equal gusto to what I feel morally compelled to write on behalf of under-privileged dogs. The gift of a pedigreed pooch from Senator […]
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