As the editor of 'Cosmopolitan,' I talk to hundreds of young women about the sometimes bewilderingly rapid changes taking place in our romantic lives and the role new technology plays in our search for intimacy and commitment.

I got a journalism degree. I started doing journalism - I interned at 'Cosmopolitan' magazine in the 1970s, which probably wasn't the best place for me, and I spent six or nine months freelancing. Anyway, I wasn't that good at it.

Around the world, our cities are not the idealised open, accessible, and cosmopolitan spaces of our dreams. More often than not, they are sectioned and controlled purviews of the radically wealthy, surrounded by clusters of have-nots.

China is doing lots of things right. It's investing in education and R&D, it's opening up, it's more cosmopolitan than it's ever been. I think it's very likely that China will continue to explode economically and certainly become a superpower.

Born in England during the First World War, of Belgian parents with partly German roots, I grew up in the cosmopolitan city of Antwerp, where I had the benefit of a classical education taught in the two national languages of Belgium: French and Dutch.

Montreal is a very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, erudite, educated, glorious city today. But it wasn't quite that way when I was growing up there. There was a lot of anti-Semitism. And I had to deal with that in an area of the city that had very few Jews.

Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.

Utah may well be the most cosmopolitan state in America. Vast numbers of young Mormons - increasingly women as well as men - spend a couple of years abroad as missionaries and return jabbering in Thai or Portuguese and bearing a wealth of international experience.

And therefore we must seek dialogue in this networked world. We must ask which voice was actually attempting to make itself heard and saw no other possibility of gaining a hearing. To that extent, for a while this also represented a forced opening of a cosmopolitan view.

The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that's as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there's so many things I don't know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures - maybe even 18 or 19 of them - when I get on a subway car every day.

That was the first major social sciences conference at which social scientists from all cultures wanted to reach a consensus on whether we can continue to pursue a national course in the social sciences or whether we need a cosmopolitan path that also connects us in a new way.

First of all, 'Sarkar' is not an underworld film. It's about a man at the head of a feudal set-up in the middle of a cosmopolitan city, where he almost runs a parallel government largely due to his personal charisma. And the film is about his friends and enemies and his family.

Shows like 'Sex and the City' got women involved again in a political way. They were drawn into the personal stories of the four women who together make up one complete cosmopolitan woman. We want to have community, and the show filled that void in our lives: friendship between women.

My parents knew a wider range of people than most, and so we had actors, journalists, politicians, planters, sportsmen and women and business folk all coming in and out of the places we lived in. Although my parents were not wealthy, they lived a legendary and amazingly cosmopolitan life.

As a young woman, I was disturbed by the fact that there was no imagery that truly expressed the experience of a young woman and the challenges and turbulence we go through. All we had were teenage magazines like 'Cosmopolitan,' which are very one-sided and show an objectified view of women.

I picked up an issue of Cosmopolitan the other day that had tips for job interviews, because I was like, 'I need to get better at interviews.' The article was basically about how to get someone not to hate you in 20 minutes. Every single thing they told you not to do, I was like, 'I do that every day.'

Until the Eighties, Oslo was a rather boring town, but it's changed a lot, and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown, I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries, and to admire the modern architecture such as the Opera House or the new Astrup Fearnley Museum on the water's edge.

My parents, of Belgian-German extraction, were Belgian nationals who had taken refuge in England during the war. They returned to Belgium in 1920, and I grew up in the cosmopolitan harbour city of Antwerp, at a time when education in the Flemish part of the country was still half French and half Flemish.

Those small things, like giving a hug to man, I try to avoid it. Because I can see the situation is coming, and I try to prepare. But I remember the first time I did it, I was 16, and I was at the gymnasium, and it was a cosmopolitan thing, an international thing, a modern thing, but I never felt at ease with it at all.

Peace and security in the Asia-Pacific will turn on whether China emerges as a xenophobic, chauvinistic force, bitter and hostile to the West because it tried to slow down or abort its development, or whether it is educated and involved in the ways of the world - more cosmopolitan, more internationalized and outward looking.

Sarajevo was this beautiful city, very cosmopolitan, multiethnic, full of wonderful people, artists and writers and poets and Serbs and Muslims and Croats, and living side by side. And then this medieval siege, and it was a medieval siege, came, and the Bosnian Serbs were on the hills lobbing in rockets and grenades and mortars.

For those who struggle with anti-pagan prejudices and stereotypes, Humanist Paganism might be a powerful educational tool. It can show that a pagan can be a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and enlightened person, and that a pagan culture can be artistically vibrant, environmentally conscious, intellectually stimulating, and socially just.

I had started writing as a poet in a closed, post-Revival, claustrophobic world, where the shadows of the national upheaval and the intense effort - the intense self-conscious effort - to make a literary movement were still evident. Now we lived a life as writers that was more cosmopolitan, more open, that had more travel and exchange.

Share This Page