News

Both in Alaska and on Capitol Hill there has been remarkably little gloating ---much less rejoicing--- over Ted Stevens' current problems and apparently impending downfall. Even NPR's reporting has been as much in sorrow as in anger. Ted Stevens has been around this...

The last week saw the passing of a man and a woman who were both not only important figures at the Nixon White House, but by any measure significant in twentieth-century American history.  On July 23, Clay T. Whitehead, director of the White House Office of...

Chinese authorities promised to relax internet controls as one of the conditions negotiated with the International Olympic Committee. However, over time, that commitment has been slowly eroded as the Olympics got closer. Chinese authorities later stated that internet...

Looking at a copy of Time today, and considering the utterly peripheral role the newsweeklies now play, it's impossible to imagine how much clout that magazine had for so long until television took over as the purveyor and arbiter of news in the early 1970s. But back...

Leon Wieseltier is the Washington Diarist in the new New Republic. "Dread of Winter" is a typically thoughtful, provocative, and stylish article about ---among many other things--- the recent "humorous" New Yorker Obamas-as-terrorists cover. There is also a new (at...

Here it is, uploaded less than 24 hours ago: the teaser-trailer for Oliver Stone's upcoming epic biopic W. It looks ---how can I put this delicately--- like a real stinker. But then it's only a trailer. It's a wonderful world, and a lot could happen between now and 17...

(UPDATE: Great minds continue to think alike, and I published this post unaware of my colleague Robert Nedelkoff's just-prior notice of this unhappy turn of events.) One reads today's typically insightful Bob Novak column with the knowledge that he was rushed to a...

Robert Novak's new column concerning the campaign, linked to below among the featured articles, is a quite incisive analysis of Sen. Barack Obama's big dilemma of the moment - how to get his support in the polls above 50%, which means trying to find a way to move...

The August issue of Smithsonian has a feature on "Four Political Conventions That Changed America," including articles on the 1912 Republican convention by Lewis Gould; the 1948 Democratic convention by Truman biographer Alonzo Hamby; the 1968 Democratic convention by...

Today's International Herald Tribune runs some interesting statistics regarding Chinese national ambitions and directions. Over all...Chinese satisfaction with the country soared in recent years, according to a survey of Chinese adults after the onset of civil unrest...