James Warren

Following the Obama-Cheney face-off on national security, I stumbled onto this terrorism-related development: when it comes to avoiding security hassles at U.S. airports, it may be best that one is Dutch. As a friend responded when I told him of this discovery, perhaps it's because we figure you can't put bombs in wooden shoes. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security and its U.S. Customs and Border Protection are expanding a program to make it easier to… More »

Thursday's national security grudge match between President Obama and former Vice President Cheney could not have been more vivid in its disparities nor richer in mutual recrimination. Rarely have two men of such rank been so dismissive of one another's recent handiwork. If given the rights, officials of the World Wrestling Federation would have erected a steel cage, stuck the two inside and charged $49.99 admission on cable pay per view. More »

David Strauss can't bring himself to call his friend and former University of Chicago Law School colleague "Barack" any more. "I think the President really is not an old-fashioned, civil-rights-era liberal," said Strauss, the Gerald Ratner Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School (must make for a long business card). I nudged nudged Strauss into playing a popular parlour game: the Supremes Sweepstakes, or speculating about… More »

Eliot Warren arrived Friday morning. Perhaps reminding us of the dichotomy between science and mystery, the obstetrician's prediction on weight was off by nearly three pounds. He figured a distinctly light bundle but what came into our lives was nine pounds, ten ounces, and a Shaquille O'Neal-like 23 inches. My wife, Cornelia, and I (but mostly me) probably erred by focus-grouping the name with friends. I had a total aversion to anything on that annual list of… More »

Tom Friedman's unchallenged virtue is making the complicated simple. He's done it again, albeit inadvertently, when it comes to journalists taking money. More »

David Brooks of the New York Times argues that Republicans spend too much time worrying about freedom and individual choice rather than community and sharing. Perhaps the GOP should call Chicago's big television stations, where sharing will soon be the order of the day, and night. Economic anxiety is breeding what seems a pragmatic camaraderie but may constitute, upon later inspection, the media's latest self-inflicted wound. More »

CHICAGO---As President Obama was meeting French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the richly elegant Palais Rohan in Strasbourg, a Stanford University political scientist confided to colleagues in a dimly-lit hotel ballroom that he still doesn't understand why polls botched Obama's defeat in the New Hampshire primary 15 months earlier.  "They were so badly off," said Doug Rivers, who also runs the research firm YouGov/Polimetrix  and who consulted for both CBS News… More »

A former managing editor of The Chicago Tribune probes the collapse of the newspaper industry and tries, mostly in vain, to find hope for the future of journalism.

A selection from recently released material in the National Archives

A selection from recordings in the National Archives