Sonja Kohn never had trouble reaching Bernie Madoff, whether by phone or in person. “I would always put her in to Bernie, because he always wanted to talk to her,” recalls Eleanor Squillari, Madoff’s personal secretary for 20 years. When Kohn ventured from Europe to visit Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, a warm welcome always awaited her at his 19th-floor office in the high-rise known as the Lipstick Building on Manhattan’s East Side. More ›

The last time the United States observed a major anniversary of the Civil War, the centennial celebration in 1961–65, things quickly fell apart. When the Civil War Centennial Commission held a national convention in Charleston, S.C., where the war began with the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, it denied a black delegate admission to the convention’s segregated hotel. More ›

When Marta Vieira da Silva was 10, a skinny tomboy in Dois Riachos, her hometown in the Brazilian dust bowl in the northeastern state of Alagoas, her team coach gave her a new pair of football boots. They were three sizes too big. “I can take them back,” he offered. “No! They’re perfect,” she shot back. It was her first pair of cleats, and she wasn’t about to let them go. More ›

Amid horrific Nazi madness, Wiera Gran sang love songs in the Warsaw Ghetto. Within the walls of that grim urban cage, the 25-year-old petite Jewish beauty drew crowds to the ghetto’s Café Sztuka, crooning standards from happier times in a deep, velvety lilt. More ›

To see firsthand how the momentous changes in Egypt are playing out, a NEWSWEEK writer and a photographer traveled by train from Alexandria to Aswan, a journey of roughly 1,100 kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea through the Sahara. More ›

It takes more than a hit movie to disrupt the social pillars that have stood at Harvard for 200 years. But with "The Social Network" up for best picture and seven other Oscars next Sunday, there are signs of life imitating art imitating life on campus. More ›

After a few days of sleeping in a dank cell in South Africa, Jennifer Hudson started to lose it. More ›

American military power has always provoked mixed reactions from the rest of the world. It has also been a source of deep ambivalence at home, as a deft new book on President Dwight Eisenhower shows. More ›