Fall 2024

Nicholaus Mills defends confidentiality for journalists

Nicholaus Mills looks at the first battle for Social Security

The latest addition to the Mall in Washington, the new National World War II Memorial, is by architectural standards very modest. It deliberately defers to its more famous neighbors, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Its plaza, located on …

In the midst of the Second World War and the 1944 election, it was the example of Abraham Lincoln, “the greatest wartime President in our history,” that Franklin D. Roosevelt evoked when he addressed the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. …

In the midst of his speech at the 1993 dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel shocked President Bill Clinton and the audience by departing from his prepared remarks to observe, …

It is no surprise that this past April, after China returned the crew of an American spy plane that made a forced landing on Hainan Island following a mid-air collision with a Chinese jet, the Bush administration went out of …

As he accepted the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, Bob Dole, one of the Senate’s toughest infighters for more than a decade, cautioned his supporters that President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore were “opponents, not enemies.” Dole’s words of …

The doctors of E.R., the lawyers of Ally McBeal, the teenagers of Dawson’s Creek. This year, as last, ensemble casts dominate television’s leading programs. The newest ensemble cast is, however, different from the others. It consists of a fictional president …

Thirty-five years ago this summer, a group of college students—most of them white, most of them Northerners, most of them middle class—began gathering at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. They were at first glance no different from the …

From the very beginning of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic nineteenth-century novel The Scarlet Letter, it is easy to hate the Puritans he so carefully describes. They are not simply content to make his heroine, Hester Prynne, wear a scarlet A because …

In recent years the last episodes of certain long-running sitcoms have become a major cultural events in American life. Record numbers of us turn on our television sets to watch what is going to happen to people who have been …

It used to be, as the New York Times has nostalgically pointed out, that our monuments came in three easy-to-choose styles. There was Egyptian obelisk (the Washington Monument), traditional classic (the Jefferson Memorial), and standard equestrian (St. Gaudens’s William Tecumseh …

At the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, you don’t, as you do at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, get a bright tin badge to wear once you have paid admission. Instead, …