America’s New Archivist

David S. Ferriero has been nominated by President Obama to be the 10th Archivist of the United States.  He is seen above in the Main Reading Room at the 5th Avenue and 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library.  (Photo by Joyce Dopkeen for The New...

Annals Of The Obama Administration

The President announced today  this year’s recipients of America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  He said: “These outstanding men and women represent an incredible diversity of backgrounds.  Their tremendous...

Laughing Matters

As last night’s clunkily polemical opening segment demonstrated, the Daily Show has, indeed, jumped the shark. But John Oliver’s piece was based on a very clever premise: And the interview with John Bolton was text book TV:

7.29.67

Today is the forty-second anniversary of a vitally important but mostly unheralded milestone on RN’s road to the presidency in 1968: his Lakeside Speech at the Bohemian Grove.  He later wrote: "If I were to choose the speech that gave me the most...

Laughing Matters

The bad news is that both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report have, over the last few months, decisively jumped the shark.  Maybe they changed writers; or maybe the old writers just ran out of snark and irony and steam, and decided that polemics were as funny as...