He Has Done The State Some Service

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...

RIP Anne L. Armstrong And Clay T. Whitehead

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...

What? No Wikipedia at the Olympics?

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...

RIP Otto Fuerbringer

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...

Some Required (OK, Highly Recommended) Reading

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...