Jonathan Darman

Janice Min finished her week's work and went home. She put the phone on hold, put her baby to bed--and returned to a blinking red light. "I saw the seven missed calls," the Us Weekly editor says, "and I thought, 'Oh, God'."It was Jan. 7, the day Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston announced their separation: for celebrity mags, as big as it gets.

Young voters continue to turn a cold shoulder on President George W. Bush and his policies, according to the latest NEWSWEEK GENEXT poll. As the battle for the White House begins to heat up, voters aged 18-29 are giving the incumbent president poor marks on his handling of the economy, the war in Iraq and overall job performance.In the GENEXT poll, only 47 percent of young voters approve of Bush's performance in office, echoing the 48 percent of all registered voters who approved of the...

It's unlikely that either George W. Bush or John Kerry's political strategists stay up at night worrying about broadband. The availability of the high-speed Internet technology is not now and will not be a central issue in this year's presidential campaign.

As some U.S. commentators would have it, all Arab media are stewing cauldrons of anti-Americana. The Bush administration may be unable to promote security (let alone democracy) in Iraq, some thinking goes, as long as people in the Arab and Islamic world are fed improbable tales of an international Zionist conspiracy and inundated with doctored images of U.S. soldiers slaughtering innocents in the Iraqi streets.

The quiver in George W. Bush's lip was slight, but not too tiny for the television cameras to detect. In front of him was an audience of smiling faces, party faithful gathered for a Republican Governors Association fundraiser.

Everyone seems to have their own tale about the sizzling real estate market. The friend who paid a million for a cookie-cutter apartment with no light. The relative who waited three hours in the rain just to get in the door of a suburban open house.

Sen. John Kerry, who once held a commanding, double-digit advantage over President George W. Bush among young Americans, now finds himself in a statistical dead heat with the president among voters aged 18-29, according to the latest NEWSWEEK/GENEXT poll.

The publication of "Against all Enemies: Inside the White House's War on Terror"--the new tell-all memoir by Richard A. Clarke--has the White House on the defensive this week.

Ralph Nader may have been abandoned by some of his celebrity backers, railed against in Democratic Party circles and skewered on late night TV, but the consumer advocate still packs a powerful punch with young voters.

New York City third graders already have a host of authority figures to answer to when they perform poorly in school--teachers, principals, parents. Now another adult wants to have his say: Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

When CEO Michael Eisner stood before a crowded room of Walt Disney Co. shareholders in Philadelphia on Wednesday, he knew that many of them wanted his head.

When President Bush announced his support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage earlier this week, he seemed to be playing smart politics.

Social issues are supposed to set young people on fire. Abortion, the environment, equal rights--in the late 20th century, these issues made young Americans vote, rally and riot in the streets.

The words "Social Security" showed up once in President Bush's January State of the Union address. In two clipped sentences towards the end of his speech, Bush expressed his hope that younger workers would "have the opportunity to build a nest egg by saving part of their Social Security taxes in a personal retirement account" and that the Social Security system would transform into a "source of ownership for the American people." Republicans in the House chamber applauded.

Kickoff isn't until Sunday, but across the broad expanses of the Internet, the Super Bowl is already a hotly contested game. It's not the Patriots-Panthers matchup that's causing controversy.

Young voters are sharply divided on the economy, the Iraq war and overall approval of President George W. Bush's job performance, according to an exclusive new NEWSWEEK poll conducted among young voters, the Newsweek Genext Poll.

Jeffrey Sachs has never been big on understatement. When NEWSWEEK profiled Sachs, an economist who serves as director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and as a special adviser to the United Nations, for its Who's Next issue last year, he was routinely warning audiences that the devastation caused by the AIDS pandemic would soon cause the earth to "quake." While a commission he led at the World Health Organization encouraged the world's richest countries to pony up $27 billion for AIDS...

Friends and foes of the drug MDMA, popularly known as Ecstasy, have always accepted certain truisms about the drug. 'E' makes its users feel good, gives them a boost that makes them want to dance, among other things, all night long.A less pleasant part of E-orthodoxy?

The pundits have plenty of theories about why Democratic presidential candidates Howard Dean and John Kerry have decided to forego public funding to avoid caps on spending in their primary campaigns.Dean is betting on sealing up the nomination early, some say.

It has burned before, it is burning now, it will certainly burn again. The thousands of Californians fleeing this week from billowing blazes brought in by the haunting Santa Ana winds are hardly the first Golden Staters to see their lives go up in flames.

American casualties are the ugly benchmark of the occupation of Iraq. Military or political authorities who claim progress in the reconstruction risk grisly contradiction when another soldier's death is announced.

Apologies to New York's olive-oil-stained wretches. Mario Batali, the Manhattan super-chef whose new Food Network show, "Ciao America," surveys American Italian food, says that for all its braggadocio, New York's Little Italy comes up a little short.

Angry tigers are all the rage these days, from the 400-pounder holed up in Harlem to the stressed-out kitty that went postal on Siegfried's Roy. It's clear that a tiger's place is in the wild--not a housing project or the MGM Mirage.

Intolerable Cruelty" got you craving George Clooney? Stalkers have been trailing the "K Street" producer to his Washington gym. More restrained Clooney crazies might want to hit the video store.

James Carville has gone Hollywood. Oh, wait, that's right, James Carville already went Hollywood. Sorry. It's hard to remember a time when the former Clinton aide and Democratic political guru's life wasn't filled with Tinseltown touches.He and his wife, GOP insider Mary Matalin, have been doing their unoriginal odd couple routine on our TV sets for more than a decade.

It's almost an abstract figure. President Bush says he wants $87 billion to fund the occupation in Iraq and limited operations in Afghanistan. But is that a lot when it comes to the pocket books of United States government?On the one hand, Bush's tax cuts will cost the federal government close to $300 billion this year alone.

Jacqueline Kennedy spent the spring of 1964 living in a haunted city. Jolted from the White House by her husband's assassination, the young widow landed in Georgetown where she and her children tried to assemble a new life.

Tarsem Singh doesn't believe in sparing his audience. In one scene from his new horror movie, he shows serial killer Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio) hunched over a bathtub filled with milky white liquid.

In America's short-attention-span culture, where being aware means knowing what's in and what's over, we've come to expect a logical cycle for popularity.

So "Big Brother," the next big "reality" show supposed to rack up big ratings is a big disappointment. Before the first cast member gets the boot, the first couple gets its groove on and the first fight gets physical, viewers are saying they've had enough.