Michael Winship

Facing the truth is hard to do, especially the truth about ourselves. So Americans have been sorely pressed to come to terms with the fact that after 9/11 our government began to torture people, and did so in defiance of domestic and international law. Most of us haven't come to...

The weather's getting warmer in Afghanistan and the war there is heating up again. That means -- as it has meant every year for more than a decade -- that the pace will quicken at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. More casualties will be brought to this

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about how the media giants who own your local commercial television and radio stations have been striking like startled rattlesnakes at an FCC proposal that would shed a light on who's buying our elections. The proposed new rule would make it easier...

Benjamin Franklin, who used his many talents to become a wealthy man, famously said that the only things certain in life are death and taxes. But if you're a corporate CEO in America today, even they can be put on the backburner -- death held at bay by the best...

Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the president signs it into law. But the fight's just begun, because the special interests immediately...

Watching some of the news coming from Capitol Hill this week, two old music videos started buzzing around in our heads. One was the classic "I'm Just a Bill," from Schoolhouse Rock, in which a beleaguered piece of legislation sits outside on the marble steps hoping to someday become a...

Neither of us is old enough to have been fooled by the Trojan Horse (see Wikipedia). But we each have been working in public television decades enough to remember the days when distribution was handled by physically transporting bulky 2-inch videotapes from station to station -- "bicycled" was the word...

Growing up Protestant in a small town in upstate New York, the commemoration of Lent was not as major an event as it would be in, say, a Catholic household. We didn't give up chocolate or gum or anything else for those forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter, nor...

On Tuesday, Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford was convicted in a Houston federal court on 13 out of 14 criminal counts of fraud.

As the New York Times reported,

The jury decision followed a six-week trial and came three years after Mr. Stanford was accused of defrauding...

Facts are stubborn things, said founding father John Adams, a basic truth Ronald Reagan famously mangled at the Republican National Convention in 1988, when he tried to quote Adams and declared, "Facts are stupid things," before correcting himself.

Nonetheless, in practice, certain of our financial and political leaders seem to...

If you would seek proof of that famous Margaret Mead adage, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has," look at what's happening as more and more people protest Apple Inc.'s labor practices in China.

Take...

Watching what's happening to our democracy is like watching the cruise ship Costa Concordia founder and sink slowly into the sea off the coast of Italy, as the passengers, shorn of life vests, scramble for safety as best they can, while the captain trips and falls conveniently into a...

And now, a word about a good American being demonized, despite being long dead. Saul Alinsky is not around to defend himself, but that hasn't kept Newt Gingrich from using his name to whip up the froth and frenzy of his followers, whose ignorance of the man is no...

A week or so ago, we read in the New York Times about what in the Gilded Age of the Roman Empire was known as a bacchanal -- a big blowout at which the imperial swells got together and whooped it up.

This one occurred here in Manhattan at the...

We've already made our choice for the best headline of the year, so far: "Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff."

When we saw it on the website Gawker.com we had to smile -- but the smile didn't last long. There's simply too much truth in...

There's no more scrupulous or versatile broadcast journalist than NPR's Daniel Zwerdling. He is one of those reporters who keeps his eye on the sparrow -- that is, on small details from individual lives that add up to significant issues of public policy. As he described in a

Come on now: Let's take a breath and put this NPR fracas into perspective.

Just as public radio struggles against yet another assault from the its long-time nemesis -- the right-wing machine that would thrill if our sole sources of information were Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and...

"Sell crazy someplace else, we're all stocked up here."

Given the level of wackiness that seems to have afflicted this third planet from the sun, Jack Nicholson's immortal line in the movie As Good as It Gets (written by Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks), should become our worldwide slogan....

"More cheese, less sleaze!"

That was the funniest group chant at Tuesday's rally of several hundred union and other progressive activists outside the Manhattan headquarters of Fox News.

Several "cheeseheads" were in attendance, their noggins topped by the now familiar wedge-shaped, orange hatwear made...

Forced at gunpoint this weekend to clean out a lot of old paper files in anticipation of some home improvements, I ran across some articles and obituaries I had saved following the death, a little more than five and a half years ago, of the late, great Ann Richards, former...