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Thomas Pynchon, the mystery man of modern American letters (though not exactly all that mysterious - his voice is, after all, a familiar one to regular viewers of reruns of The Simpsons), has a new novel out in about a week. Its title is Inherent Vice, and it's his...

It is now a little over twenty-four hours since the eminent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge (Mass.) Police Department sat down at a white lawn table on the South Lawn of the White House, joined by President Obama (with...

So here I am, having just judged the Daily Show as having jumped the shark by substituting predictable polemic for snarky satire, posting yet another Daily Show clip for your comedy delectation. So what's up with that?  Was I hasty?  Did I jump...the gun? Or was I...

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...

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 accomplishments span fields...

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:

On last night's Daily Show Jon Stewart considered the consequences of Henry Louis-Gate: And discussed them with "Senior Black Correspondent" (and veteran TV producer, writer, and Peabody winner) Larry Wilmore:

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 pleasure...

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...

The late Walter Cronkite learned the craft of journalism working for his high school paper in Houston and later for the Daily Texan at the University of Texas in Austin. One day in late March of 1935, he was sent to interview a visiting writer who was to speak at Hogg...