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Feminism hovered in the wings, but at the time my girlfriends and I read Sartre (or tried to, or just said we did) and marched with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, there to lust after intense young men in duffel coats who held forth on the iniquities of Cold War saber-rattling.

I was far too self-absorbed to feel real fear at the prospect of being vaporized by a mushroom cloud — the image that opens Sally Potter's wonderfully high-strung period piece, Ginger and Rosa. Potter's semi-autobiographical domestic melodrama is set in a romantically seedy part of London in 1962, when the director was entering adolescence. Like Potter was then, its eponymous central figure (that would be Ginger) is a sensitive young redhead and budding artist played by Elle Fanning.

Like Ginger, I wore my hair long and straight (ironing was optional), my men's sweaters baggy, my glasses wire-rimmed, my expression pained for the sorrows of the world. Like her, I was miserable — though as it turned out, with far less reason.

I didn't run with girls like Ginger or her best friend Rosa (Alice Englert). Coming from a reasonably stable, lower-middle-class suburban family, I slogged my way obediently through the advanced curriculum and never played hooky. As the first member of my extended family to apply to university, I sensed there was far too much at stake to goof off. In most countercultures, it's the elite who rebel.

Intimidated by the posh accents and willowy grace of the Gingers and Rosas (they had no hips at all), by their air of bohemian rebellion and contempt for rules, their sexual precocity and nervous gaiety, I gnawed on my envy from afar. Once, after a CND demonstration, I actually got invited home by one of them. The genteel poverty of her mother's boho flat, with its faded Persian carpets, peeling wallpaper and teetering piles of books by Freud and Heidegger — it all thrilled me to bits.

Only when I got to university — the great class leveler designed by a post-World War II Labour government — did it become obvious how fragile and vulnerable these young women were, how meshed the personal and the political were for them, and not in a good way.

That, in part, is Potter's subject. Raised, after a fashion, by pale-and-romantic single mothers with names like Anoushka and Nat, the two girls are walking on quicksand. Ginger resents her mother (Christina Hendricks), a stalled artist who remains in resentful thrall to her estranged partner, Roland (Alessandro Nivola). But she adores her father, a narcissistic champagne Marxist who blathers on about the oppressor classes, then abuses his own power over his daughter and her credulous friend in a way that would devastate most young women.

In a crisis Roland crumples, as does Ginger's mother, leaving their distraught daughter's emotional rescue to a gay couple (Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt) and their brainy American friend (Annette Bening), all of whom have a great deal more to lose by questioning authority than does Roland.

Watching this scenario unfold, I understood why so many girls like Ginger and Rosa fell apart when they got to college. They clung like limpets to charismatic male leaders of the campus revolt, who sloughed them off when they grew tiresome or needy. Some of them overdosed before finals, or dropped out altogether and became their mothers, sporadically attached to feckless men who repeatedly left them holding the babies.

Potter doesn't reduce Ginger's radicalism to her screwed-up family, still less to the miseries of adolescence. She treasures her artistic milieu and gives us no reason to doubt the girl's genuine terror of a nuclear holocaust. But bohemian or not, at home Ginger has no safety net, no source of comfort to allay her fears of world annihilation, which grow all the more terrifying for overlapping with her rickety home life.

I often wonder what became of the Gingers and Rosas, most of whom seemed to drop out of sight once we left university. Undoubtedly the women's movement bailed out Potter, most of whose movies — including her famously stylized adaptation of Virginia Woolf's gender-bending 1992 Orlando with Tilda Swinton — are inspired by feminism. With any luck, it saved Ginger and friends too.

Israel appears to have a new government, nearly two months after parliamentary elections.

Since the voting in January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle that just would not fit.

If he included traditional allies, such as the religious parties, he would close out a chance of forming a government with a popular political newcomer, Yair Lapid.

A former TV newsman, Lapid is secular and centrist. His party was the second-largest in the balloting and has demanded that ultra-Orthodox Jews perform military service, rather than receiving an exemption.

Professor Reuven Hazan of Hebrew University says that in the end, Netanyahu had to make major concessions to Lapid's centrist movement. The prime minister also made room for the right-wing Jewish Home party, which is strongly supportive of West Bank settlers.

Meanwhile, ultra-Orthodox parties are not included in the government coalition for the first time in more than three decades.

"He has formed a government that is not focused on the main issue of Israeli politics, which is security," Hazan said of Netanyahu.

The new government appears more concerned with domestic questions, such as mandatory military service, and government reform. Attacking those problems is likely to make life harder for Netanyahu, as he will have to take things away from his traditional supporters.

The new coalition may allow Netanyahu to continue his hard-line approach toward the Palestinians.

Jewish Home is opposed to the two-state solution entirely. Yair Lapid supports negotiations, but has made clear he will not make major concessions.

Reuven Hazan says that means "we might get back to negotiating, but these negotiations will lead nowhere and they won't last for very long."

The new government is expected to be sworn in just in time for the arrival of President Obama next Wednesday.

North Korea's nuclear chest-beating has achieved the seemingly impossible by aligning the concerns of South Korea, Japan and even China, three Asian neighbors that have a long history of strained ties.

While all those countries have separate aims and interests, they share with the United States a mutual interest in containing the North Korean regime, restraining its rhetoric and keeping Pyongyang's nuclear option in a box, says Richard Bush III, the director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.

"One charming thing the North Koreans possess is an ability to drive others closer together," he says.

North Korea in recent weeks has threatened the United States, South Korea and Japan with annihilation and its nuclear and missile tests have been carried out in defiance of Beijing's warnings.

International condemnation has been fierce, aside from former NBA star and recent visitor Dennis Rodman, who declared his admiration for leader Kim Jong Un. "I love the guy. He's awesome. He's so honest," Rodman told ABC.

North Korea's recent behavior prompted Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, a professor of American foreign relations at San Diego State University and a national fellow at the Hoover Institution to write in The New York Times that "China, Japan and South Korea should be encouraged to rank this problem No.1."

SOUTH KOREA

North Korea's saber-rattling is heard loudest just south of the Demilitarized Zone. Memories of the the Korean War are never far from the surface, and are periodically refreshed by events such as a 2010 torpedo attack on a South Korean ship that killed 46 sailors. Pyongyang followed up that attack by shelling the South Korean border island of Yeonpyeong.

South Korean president at the time of the 2010 sinking, Lee Myung-bak, was criticized for his perceived weak response.

"I think that the North thought that the sinking of the South Korean ship was a huge victory because all South Korea did was sit there and wring its hands and appeal for international investigations and assistance," says George Lopez, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame who served on as a U.N. monitor for sanctions on North Korea.

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Like most people, Roth doesn't like getting old, and losing friends is perhaps the most painful part of it. "If you look at your address book," he says, "it's like walking through a cemetery."

Philip Roth: Unmasked — which opens at Film Forum in New York on March 13 and will air on PBS beginning March 29 — covers a lot of territory, beginning with Roth's recollections of growing up in Newark, N.J., followed almost immediately by his assertion that he couldn't wait to leave there forever.

He makes the case, cogently, that although certain elements of his work have been drawn from his own life, his stories are largely un-autobiographical. ("Life isn't good enough in some ways," he says, in defense of the good old-fashioned tradition of making stuff up.)

Early in the film, he notes that he doesn't like being pigeonholed as a Jewish-American writer. "I don't write in Jewish," he says simply. "I write in American."

Roth says nothing in the movie, and isn't asked, about his recent announcement that he has permanently retired from writing fiction. But he does offer some fascinating observations about how writers cannot operate from feelings of shame — which is different, he notes, from feeling shame as a person — and about the joys of writing about people who misbehave sexually.

He also discusses the point, around the time of The Counterlife, at which politics and history began to play a larger role in his work — sex and death, after all, can take you only so far.

Manera and Karel have shaped Philip Roth: Unmasked simply but carefully, keeping the number of talking heads — other than Roth's own — to a minimum. Roth's detractors may very well hate this documentary. There's no one to carp on-camera about his alleged misogyny, his preoccupation with the male ego and other assorted oldies but goodies.

Yet a Philip Roth documentary that doesn't trundle heavily down those tired old avenues is probably all the better for it. Interviewees include superstar novelist Jonathan Franzen and New Yorker staff writer Claudia Roth Pierpont, both of whom are great admirers of Roth's work. But the most persuasive and passionate of all is novelist Nicole Krauss.

"We don't go to literature for moral perfection," she says. "We go there for moral ambiguity, moral feeling, moral struggle."

Roth hands us nothing on a plate; it's the only way, maybe, to give us everything. (Recommended)