At Sarah Lawrence, the college where I teach, our endowment has been hard hit by the recession, and so have the incomes of our students' parents. We have, as a result, done the opposite of what we would do if we were a business bent on making a profit....

On Thursday night I went to a discussion of "Justice After Guantanamo" at BookCourt in Brooklyn, an independent book store six blocks up from Borough Hall on Court Street. The discussion featured a panel made up of David Bromwich, a Yale professor who has written extensively on human rights, Joseph...

The massive turnout for Michael Jackson at Tuesday's memorial service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles reflects his success as a crossover artist who appealed to both whites and blacks. The downside is the tributes to Jackson since his death on June 25 have come with a high political...

In 1980 the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its new American Wing to rave reviews. Any why not? The 1980 wing featured the spectacular glass-enclosed, glass-roofed Charles Engelhard Court and had 130,000 square feet of exhibition space -- more room than many museums have for their entire collections.

Since 1980,...

Sixty years ago, J. D. Salinger tried teaching. In 1949, long before he became famous, he gave a college writing class.

The experience was a painful one for Salinger and he chose never to repeat it. As he told New Yorker editor William Maxwell, who made...

Dog Days at the WhiteHouse
By Nicolaus Mills

At last Malia and Sasha Obama have the dog they were promised by their parents. Bo, a six-month-old Portuguese water dog, a gift from Senator Edward Kenny and his wife Victoria, has become part of the extended White House family....

MARSHALL PLAN LESSONS FOR IRAQ
By Nicolaus Mills

A soon-to-be-released government study of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq, which President Bush once called "the greatest financial commitment of its kind since the Marshall Plan," has labeled
the program a $100 billion failure. The report is one that...

THE COLLEGE BOARD CRISIS
By Nicolaus Mills

While the crisis of confidence in the nation's banking system has been capturing headlines this fall, a second crisis in confidence---this one on the reliability of the standardized tests (SAT and ACT) used by most colleges and universities in their...

When, on the night of his election victory, Barack Obama addressed the nation from Grant Park in Chicago and declared, "This is our moment. This is our time," he was doing what the two twentieth-century presidents whom he most resembles -- Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy -- also did. He...

VETERANS DAY 2008
By Nicolaus Mills

It is not easy finding a gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery.
I learned that earlier this year when I visited the grave of General George Marshall on the sixtieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan. The media had not thought the...

COLUMBUS DAY AT COLUMBUS CIRCLE
By Nicolaus Mills

New York has never had a Columbus Day like October 12, 1892. On that day 10,000 people gathered at Eighth Avenue and 59th Street to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in America by dedicating a statue to the...

Like Charlton Heston and Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, who died last Friday at age eighty-three, was one of the many Hollywood actors who made a point of joining the 1963 March on Washington. But in contrast to Heston and Brando, who are easy to find in the celebrity photographs taken...

In the midst of the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression, Barack Obama has been put on the defensive. Obama has had his message of change co-opted by an angry-sounding John McCain, who now claims that he and the Republicans are best suited to clean up the economic...