Cassandra West

Tapping into public opinion on news and current events, online polls this week covered everything from Valentine's Day to nuclear weapons in North Korea among other topics. Check out the...

In this poll-obsessed world, you can barely click on a Web site before a little window pops up asking you to vote on everything from celebrity fashions to your cell...

Jewish music encompasses practically every imaginable genre, from the symphonies of Leonard Bernstein to the Hebraic works of Ernest Bloch to the classics of George Gershwin. But perhaps none of...

The process of writing is like hacking through a dense jungle with a machete, getting lost and having to double back. Twigs catch in your hair and scratch your face....

With two new biopics, "Marie Antoinette" and "The Queen," focused squarely on their lives, they now share box office domains. It seems no matter how unkindly the public views royals,...

Last week looked pretty grim for passengers who had to dump their hair gels, shampoos, mouthwashes and fragrances before boarding their flights. Once the fog of confusion lifted, plenty of...

Judging from the throngs who turned out on two picture-perfect days over the weekend for the 2006 Chicago Tribune Printers Row Book Fair, Chicago must be the undisputed books capital...

Swarovski crystals on cell phones, iPods and BlackBerrys are so last week's news (literally: April 17, in Tempo). So what now is the, uh, most creative application for the dazzling...

Winners SNOWBOARD CROSS: Exciting new Olympic sport, way hotter than half-pipe -- and a much better choice than ski orienteering or ski mountaineering, both passed over for these Games. LANGUAGE:...

From brilliant polemicals packed with fascinating statistics and anecdotes to riveting novels featuring defiant, iconic heroines, feminist literature has taken many directions since the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan's groundbreaking...