Anna Quindlen

The man before the bench looks overwhelmed, standing hip deep in a pile of paper. "Abortion," says one document; "capital punishment," another. Government aid to parochial schools, undeclared war, de facto segregation.

In theory, access to the drug called Plan B should be a no-brainer. It's safe, it's effective, it's easily available in dozens of countries. But Plan B is a drug used to prevent pregnancy, and nothing about preventing pregnancy in America is simple, except for the fact that so many women do it as a matter of course.Plan B is an emergency contraceptive that works by inhibiting ovulation, fertilization or implantation.

Modern life has become a spectator sport. Folks with high blood pressure and no muscle tone look on as the sinewy and buff row, run and scale their way around tropical islands on television.

It's that time of year again, when the sweaters come off, the annuals come out, and the students prepare. For the test, for the test scores, for the test schedule for next year.

A glorious morning for a commencement, the sky a blue tent cut with wisps of clouds over the Columbia University campus. From time to time a plane bisected the air above, an accidental eavesdropper on the passage of time and the celebration of joy.

In 1992 I spent part of the day with the wife of the putative Democratic candidate for president. We covered the issues, the campaign and her husband's plans for the future.

Here is where we begin: with Easter, the holiest day of the Christian calendar, with the visit by Mary Magdalene to the tomb in which Jesus is laid after the crucifixion.

St. Andrew's or St. Bernadette's?" asked the stranger on the train. "St. Andrew's," I replied. Part of the last generation of Americans who grew up cocooned by Roman Catholicism, the two of us nodded in mutual understanding.

A question in honor of Women's History Month: what does the United States have in common with Brunei, Somalia, Sudan and Oman? The answer: we are among only a handful of nations on earth that have refused to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a mouthful commonly called CEDAW.

If you were a New Yorker in the '70s, people were always asking if you'd ever been mugged. (No, but my apartment was burglarized. The lowlife fed my dog to keep her quiet.) In the early '80s, it was whether you'd ever made it inside Studio 54. (Took my teenage sister.) The '90s: have you met Jerry Seinfeld? (Stood behind him and his wife at the marathon once.) And at the moment there is one question we New Yorkers get wherever we go: did you see "The Gates"?Suddenly they were gone, all 7,532 of...

There was a kind of carelessness to my childhood. I wandered away from time to time, rode my bike too far from home, took the trolley to nowhere in particular and back again.

You didn't need to be a political consultant to predict the likely linchpins of the president's State of the Union address. Safeguarding Social Security, the entitlement program whose cost accounts for a fifth of the entire federal budget.

There is now only a single abortion clinic in Mississippi. Once there were seven. There are nearly 3 million people living in the state. No other state with only one abortion clinic has as many residents.

I miss Paul Wellstone. It is not that the senator from Minnesota was liberal, although he was, or smart, although he was that, too. It was that when he said he was going to do something, he did it, and because he believed it was the right thing, not because he'd been bought and paid for by lobbyists and pressure groups.

Without even breaking a sweat you could find at least a dozen performances of Handel's "Messiah" in New York City during the month of December. There was one at the Cathedral of St.

Sixteen years ago something unexpected happened: I became the mother of a daughter. Our assumptions about the unlikelihood of this had a weird logic, my husband the eldest in a family of six boys, our first two children sons.

I've been an opinion columnist for 15 years, and the public debate that has advanced least during that time is the one about abortion. (For the record, the discussion of gay rights has come the farthest.) From the time Roe v.

Red state, blue state, old state, new state. I vote in the indigo city, a place so politically monolithic that people in line at its polling places are quick to note that they don't have a clue about the outcome. "We don't really live in America," one man said.

A rare moment of unanimity in the presidential debates came when the candidates were asked about Darfur, the western region of Sudan. As the ruling government has pursued a ruthless policy of ethnic cleansing designed to destroy the village structure there, more than a million people have fled their homes.

We introduced the Australian exchange students to Honey Nut Cheerios. They introduced us to compulsory voting. In class, they'd heard about the woeful turnout in American elections. "But aren't people concerned about paying the fine?" one of them asked.It turns out that the laid-back country in which our two curious, self-possessed and intelligent houseguests live requires its citizens to vote.

When I was a kid, the games people played could be divided into those of the body and those of the brain. Stickball and bocce, poker and chess. I had kids of my own by the time the dominant form became that hypnotic hybrid, the videogame.

In 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson made history during his first State of the Union speech with this sentence: "This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America."From that declaration a host of government initiatives sprang, including Head Start, an expanded food-stamp program, and sweeping reforms in health care for the needy.

Most politicians think it's so radioactive, they won't go near it, and government officials keep insisting it's not going to happen any time soon. But the military draft is a subject that just won't go away, particularly for young Americans and the adults who love them.A round-robin letter has been circulating furiously among mothers on the Internet, expressing concern that two bills parked in committee may prefigure the resurrection of conscription, this time without the old protections of...

At the end of Barack Obama's keynote speech to the Democratic convention, I stood up and cheered at the TV. I was alone in the den with two dogs, a piece of needlepoint and a cup of Sleepytime tea.

Maybe it's hearing the Bostonians I know talk about finding refuge elsewhere at the end of the month, or my fellow New Yorkers strategizing about how to skip Penn Station in their daily commute.

In 1962, when the New York Times quoted President John F. Kennedy during a dispute with the steel industry as saying, "My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it till now," the White House went ballistic.

Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken and inconveniently willful?"Keep her," I replied.Not helpful, but heartfelt.

When the rumor began floating around Washington that John McCain might be prevailed on to take the second spot on the Democratic presidential ticket, you could almost hear the sibilant sound of political operatives gleefully rubbing their hands together.

It was nearly 25 years ago that Robert Drinan, a member of Congress and an outspoken Jesuit (a redundancy if there ever was one), so enraged the Vatican with his defense of abortion rights that an order came down from Rome demanding priests withdraw from politics.It appears that someone has had a change of heart.Or at least that's how it seems now that certain segments of the Roman Catholic hierarchy are behaving like wholly owned subsidiaries of the Republican Party, hellbent on a course that...

Members of the class of 2004: I'm so sorry. I look at all of you and realize that, for many, life has been a relentless treadmill since you entered preschool at the age of 2.