Category: The Washington Post Column

According to its director, the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History needs new plumbing, new wiring and better lighting. So desperately does the building require renovation, in fact, that there is talk of shutting the whole place down for a year or two, of bringing in some fresher architecture, even of designing a “museum for the 21st century.” Continue reading “Give This ‘Attic’ A Story To Tell”

If you happen to be reading this while standing in one of those disturbingly slow, zigzag lines at airport security — looking repeatedly at your watch, wondering if this time you really will miss the plane — here’s something to make you feel worse: Almost none of the agony you are experiencing is making you safer, at least not to any statistically significant or economically rational degree. Continue reading “Airport Security’s Grand Illusion”

A few years ago I spent several days sitting in the back of a library in London, reading through newsletters, pamphlets and other accounts of Soviet prison conditions published in the 1970s and ’80s by Amnesty International. Sometimes these reports were remarkably detailed, testifying to the extraordinary ability of prisoners to smuggle out their stories. Continue reading “Amnesty’s Amnesia”

On the Sunday evening and Monday morning after the French voters’ definitive non to the European constitution, the French president worked the phones. Continue reading “Just Say ‘Non’”

She looked nice, Laura Bush, in her black veil and modest dress, touring the Dome of the Rock, smiling sweetly at the protesters outside. She sounded nice, too, in her keynote speech at the Dead Sea in Jordan. Continue reading “Democracy Under The Veil”

“It’s appalling that this story got out there,” said the secretary of state. “Shaky from the very get-go,” thundered the White House spokesman. “We’ve not found any wrongdoing on the part of U.S. servicemembers,” declared the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Outrage filled the airwaves this week as administration officials took turns denouncing Newsweek’s brief report of alleged desecrations of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay. Continue reading “Blaming the Messenger”

“It just offends me that the president of the United States is, directly or indirectly, attacking his own country in a foreign land.” That was 1998. The speaker, Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), was then House majority whip. The president was Bill Clinton, who had “attacked his own country” while in Uganda. Continue reading “Saying Sorry”

To the British reading public of the mid-19th century, the story was a shocking one: A woman left her fiance standing at the altar after an unexpected revelation, ran away without a penny, threw herself on the mercy of strangers — and then ultimately returned. Continue reading “Runaway Story”

Try, if you can, to picture the scene. A vast crowd in Red Square: Lenin’s tomb and Stalin’s memorial in the background. Soldiers march in goose step behind rolling tanks, and the air echoes with martial music, occasionally drowned out by the whine of fighter jets. Continue reading “Opting for Truth Over ‘Triumph’”

After the dust has settled — after the processions are over and the Masses have been said, after the new pope has accustomed himself to new apartments, new tasks, new vestments — Benedict XVI will face an extraordinary list of problems, ranging from the bioethical to the geopolitical. But for this German pope, among his toughest tasks by far will be the battle for acceptance on the continent of his birth. Continue reading “…Starting Among the ‘Christophobes’”