News

As a student in China in 1992, there was no internet access, no international cable TV (after 1989, CNN was only available in five-star hotel rooms) and imported newspapers were days old and cost almost ten dollars. Friends at the U.S. consulate provided video...

FDR (and RN) biographer Conrad Black has posted a thoughtful and instructive piece on The Daily Beast: "Why The Right Should Leave FDR Alone". Apparently some right wingers (specifically "some supply-side economic purists") have been bashing FDR, claiming that he...

Yahoo's news section has an article about the latest celebrity endorsements of Sen. Barack Obama, accompanied by two video clips. In one of these, paid for by the Obama campaign, actor Ed O'Neill, none too ably channeling his Al Bundy persona from the Married....With...

Alas, it won't be available in time for holiday giving this year, but a new book by William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn ---Race Course Against White Supremacy--- will be published by the Third World Press on 1 June 2009. The appealing and evocative title alone should...

There's good news for those in the Washington area who just can't wait for the opening of the Frost/Nixon film. Peter Morgan's original play, in its nationally touring production, opens at the Kennedy Center next month for a two-week run, with Alan Cox as Sir David...

Words matter. It was said that Lyndon Johnson had little regard for “the integrity of words.” Sadly, that is how it is with many politicians. But at the end of the day, though we have many ways to examine a particular candidate, it comes back much of the time to...

Ken Adelman's credentials in Republican circles go back four decades. He served in the Commerce Department, then under Donald Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Department of Defense, during the Nixon and Ford administrations respectively. During...

Here's a link to an article about the upcoming election by Joan Didion. It's a short piece with a long provenance; it is brought to you via The Daily Beast (where it is nicely titled "Slouching Toward Washington"), from today's Salon (where it is given the rather...

Few Americans remember Quemoy and Matsu, but they were a key issue in the 1960 debates between Kennedy and Nixon.  These Taiwanese-governed islands lie just off the coast of mainland China.  A couple of times during the 1950s, the communists had shelled these islands,...

There is now a website on which fellow academics are invited to express solidarity with the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Education's Distinguished Professor: It seems that the character assassination and slander of Bill Ayers and other people who have...