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Nixon's Failed Attempts At 'Poisoning The Press'

Richard Nixon is remembered as a ruthless politician driven at times by fear and hatred of his perceived enemies. But a new book suggests that Nixon’s paranoia was based at least in part on his own experience.

In Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture, Mark Feldstein describes the epic battle between Nixon and the muckraking syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. Feldstein follows the rise of Anderson’s investigative journalism career and explains how his decades-long face-off with Nixon would become emblematic of the relationship between the press and other politicians.

Good Fresh Air Interview with Feldstein.

Lincoln's Evolving Thoughts On Slavery, And Freedom

“Lincoln said during the Civil War that he had always seen slavery as unjust. He said he couldn’t remember when he didn’t think that way — and there’s no reason to doubt the accuracy or sincerity of that statement,” explains historian Eric Foner. “The problem arises with the next question: What do you do with slavery, given that it’s unjust? Lincoln took a very long time to try to figure out exactly what steps ought to be taken.”

Foner traces the evolution of Lincoln’s thoughts on slavery in The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. He explains how Lincoln’s changing thoughts about slavery — and the role of freed slaves — mirrored America’s own transformation.

Foner is always a splendid interview (38 minutes)

Justice Breyer: The Court, The Cases And Conflicts

n Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge’s View, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer outlines his ideas about the Constitution and about the way the United States legal system works.

Breyer, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Clinton in 1994, explains that he interprets the Constitution as a living document, in opposition to some of his colleagues — including Justice Antonin Scalia — who see it as a static and literal set of rules that do not change over time.

Breyer argues that the framers knew that the interpretation of the document would continue to change as America evolved — and that members of the Supreme Court should apply the Constitution’s values to modern circumstances.

Breyer Interview

Teddy Roosevelt And The 'Burn' That Saved Forests

In The Big Burn — subtitled Teddy Roosevelt and The Fire That Saved America — Egan argues that the fire actually saved the nation’s forests, even as its flames charred the trees. The disaster served to strengthen the fledgling U.S. Forest Service, and rally public opinion behind Theodore Roosevelt’s plan to protect national lands.

Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of five books. He won the National Book Award for his critically acclaimed Dust Bowl chronicle The Worst Hard Time.

Fresh Air Interview

China's leaders meet to plan economic future

China’s ruling Communist Party is meeting in Beijing to draw up its next five-year plan for the economy.

The agenda is secret but analysts say that instead of seeking a high rate of economic growth, China’s leaders want to close the gap between rich and poor and between coastal and inland areas.

Analysts will also be watching for signs of who will be China’s next leader – due to take office in 2012.

Read on from BBC

The sacked mayor of Moscow: Medvedev 1, Luzhkov 0

DMITRY MEDVEDEV has been long on talk and short on action ever since he became Russia’s president in 2008. That is why some were surprised on September 28th when he dramatically fired Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow since 1992, citing a “loss of confidence”. The 74-year-old Mr Luzhkov was one of Russia’s most powerful politicians and a senior figure in the ruling United Russia party. He is a household name all over the country; his wife, Yelena Baturina, a construction magnate, is Russia’s richest woman.

Read more on this power struggle among the Russian elite

1945-1998 Nuclear Explosions

“This piece of work is a bird’s eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second.  No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier.  The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted.  I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world.”

See this display of the history of nuclear explosions.

Russia in color, a century ago

With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time – when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948

Fascinating Photos!

Mexico's ruling party: The new old guard

These days, the PAN is part of the system. After 61 years in opposition, it wrested the presidency from the hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000 and held it in 2006. Its strengths reflect its legacy as the protagonist of Mexico’s transition to multi-party democracy. Unlike the big-tent PRI, the conservative PAN knows what it stands for. “Whereas the PRI is driven by power, the PAN tends to be driven by ideology,” says Luis Rubio, the head of CIDAC, a think-tank. And unlike the fractious Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), its leftist counterpart, the PAN runs a slick operation.

More analysis from The Economist

Tools to Measure an Economy

There are various tools that Economists use to measure the economy. No one tool offers a full or clear picture of economic health. Rather, these tools must be used in concert. Here is a basic definition and description of GDP, GNP, PPP and The Big Mac Index (all you need for APCG).

Of course, there are more creative and holistic means to measure the health of the economy. For example, statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation’s success by its productivity — instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people. He introduces the Happy Planet Index, which tracks national well-being against resource use (because a happy life doesn’t have to cost the earth). Which countries rank highest in the HPI? You might be surprised.

A power struggle in Iran

In the summer of 2009 Iran’s divided conservatives came together to save the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after his disputed re-election provoked huge street protests by the reformist Green Movement. To have lost Mr Ahmadinejad to a liberal “plot” would, they judged, have imperilled the Islamic Republic which succours them all.

All the same, many conservatives are far from enamoured of Iran’s president. Challenging him, however, is turning out to be a different matter.

More on the power struggle from The Economist

The End of Men?

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences.

Hanna Rosin offers some paradigm shaking evidence in this piece from The Atlantic.

Note: it might be best to disregard the headline grabbing title of this article. Silly antics. 

Mexico's state elections

DURING the campaign ahead of Mexico’s state elections on July 4th, many feared that the gruesome run-up to the vote would overshadow the results. Two candidates were murdered, and countless others were intimidated: one would-be mayor found a decapitated corpse deposited outside his home. The atrocities, including four dead bodies hung from bridges on election day, were attributed to drug gangs reminding the country who rules the roost.

Yet the vote itself, in 14 of Mexico’s 31 states, provided a surprise that could redraw the country’s political map. The opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000, took over the lower house of Congress from Felipe Calderón’s conservative National Action Party (PAN) in 2009. It had been forecast to sweep all 12 of this year’s contests for governorships before winning the presidency after Mr Calderón steps down in 2012. Instead, it took just nine, the same number it held before the vote.

Read on from The Economist

Why Russia Matters

A year and a half after Barack Obama hit the “reset” button with Russia, the reconciliation is still fragile, incomplete, and politically divisive. Sure, Russia is no easy ally for the United States. Authoritarian yet insecure, economically mighty yet technologically backward, the country has proven a challenge for U.S. presidents since the end of the Cold War. Recent news hasn’t helped: The arrest in July of a former deputy prime minister and leader of the Solidarity opposition movement, Boris Nemtsov, provoked some of the harshest criticism of Russia yet from the Obama administration. Then last Wednesday, Russia announced that it had moved anti-aircraft missiles into Abkhazia, the region that broke off from Georgia during the August 2008 war. The announcement was hardly welcome news for the United States, which has tried to defuse tensions there for the last 24 months. 
Yet however challenging this partnership may be, Washington can’t afford not to work with Moscow. Ronald Reagan popularized the phrase, “Trust, but verify” — a good guiding principle for Cold War arms negotiators, and still apt for today. Engagement is the only way forward. Here are 10 reasons why