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I took two walks earlier today. Despite the dire warnings of the media about the ghastly human gridlock that was (and probably will be tomorrow) inevitable, I braved the Metro system, and wandered around the Mall and the White House precincts for about an hour this...

Good friends we have had, Oh, good friends we've lost along the way. In this great future you can't forget your past. The Gilberto Gil cover of "No Woman No Cry" has been working its way to the top of my TNN Weekly Weekend Reward queue for several months. This concert...

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,But to be young was very heaven! Wordsworth's vision of 1789 is no less true in 2009 as hordes of young uns descend on Washington to begin their jobs in the Obama administration. JFK brought numbers of younger-than-usual staffers...

The BBC's excellent arts magazine radio program  The Strand invited several writers and poets to compose "open letters" to Barack Obama on the occasion of his inauguration. The two that most impressed and moved me were those by journalist, author, broadcaster Aminatta...

It's starting to look more and more as if the inauguration of President-elect Obama may augur an Era of Good Feelings not seen in the United States since James Monroe left the White House in 1825. Last week, a speaker at a public library not far from Richard Nixon's...

In the final hours of his tenure, President Bush commuted the sentences of Jose Alonso Compean and Ignacio "Nacho" Ramos, the former Border Patrol agents who were serving time for shooting a drug smuggler. This action draws attention to the presidential pardon power...

  Every now and then I guess we all think realistically about that day when we will be victimized with what is life's final common denominator—that something that we call death. We all think about it. And every now and then I think about my own death and I think about...

President-elect Obama has rightly received praise for reaching out to congressional Republicans.  But he's following an old path.  In 1969, RN did something similar.  From a The New York Times report dateline January 28, 1969 (published the next day): President Nixon...

Andrew Wyeth died yesterday in his sleep at his family home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; he was 91. On 19 February 1970, President and Mrs. Nixon hosted the Wyeths at a dinner they gave in his honor, on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition of his paintings in...

The website of the Washington Post yesterday featured an online chat between assorted websurfers from around the world and an author trying to promote his new book. That, in itself, is unsurprising; the Post hosts such a chat once or twice nearly every week. However,...