Art Imitates Life

In honor of Veterans Day, New York Times film critic A. O. Scott devotes this week’s “Critic’s Choice” to Franklin N. Schaffner’s 1970 masterpiece Patton. The film won seven Academy Awards — including the Best Actor Oscar for George...

A POTUS And FLOTUS By Any Other Name

In the days before communications could be encrypted, code names were required to provide at least a minimal mask for the identity of the POTUS and FLOTUS and members of the first families.  Now they’re mostly an anachronistic habit with no serious security...

20 Years Ago: The Wind Of Change

Twenty years ago today —9 November 1989— the German Democratic Republic finally read the writing on the wall (literally and figuratively) and announced that open travel would be permitted between East and West Berlin and East and West Germany. This was the...