“I want it clearly understood that from now on, ever, no reporter from the Washington Post is ever to be in the White House. Is that clear? Now that is a total order, and if necessary, I’ll fire you. Do you understand?”—President Richard Nixon to a White House aide Richard Nixon learned—the hard way—the consequences of trying to shut out...

A few nights ago, I was watching The Way We Were, a film I’ve seen more times than I can count. This time, a single line stopped me. Katie Morosky, played by Barbra Streisand, has just returned from a political demonstration in Washington. She and Hubbell are arguing when she says: “People are their principles.” It’s a simple sentence. But...

“Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”—George Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796 “Our machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption…. Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.”—Donald Trump, Election...

I’ve written about Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff before, but after watching his questioning of Jay Clayton, President Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence (DNI), I think he deserves another look—particularly in comparison with Atticus Finch, the central character in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The comparison is not exact, nor should it be. Atticus is a fictional Alabama...

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things—not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” When John F. Kennedy stood at Rice University in 1962 and said those words, he was not merely talking about rockets, astronauts, or beating the Soviets into space. He was speaking to something larger in the American...

Today, America is 250 years old. This Fourth of July, amid deep national division, it seems worth asking a simple question: Which of our country’s monuments speaks most clearly to the promise of America? It sits in New York Harbor. The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, dedicated in 1886 as a tribute to freedom and democracy. For...

For the most part, my high school history classes consisted of names, dates, documents, and battles. What I’ve learned since then — through historians like Doris Kearns-Goodwin, David McCullough, Ken Burns, and others — is that history comes alive when we discover the human stories behind the events. One of those stories belongs to John Hart of New Jersey, a...

As our nation nears its 250th anniversary, an uneasy emotional connection to the past has returned—one rooted in fear, and the question of who gets to define the “real” America. Reading The Murrow Boys, by Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson—which traces Edward R. Murrow’s journalistic coverage from World War II through the Red Scare of the 1950s—it’s hard not to...

The current American political order is starting to feel like a collision between the films Seven Days in May and All the King’s Men. One warns us about powerful institutions turning against constitutional democracy. The other shows how a populist leader can take grievance, resentment, and loyalty and turn them into a system of rule. I recently watched both films...

We are building machines that may soon judge, persuade, police, diagnose, hire, fire, and even help governments decide whom to trust. Yet we still have no truly independent way to inspect the machines themselves. AI is not just another technology. It is becoming a decision-making layer between human beings and power. That raises enormous ethical questions: Who is responsible when...