Last week a nervous little man grinned his twisted grin in the grounds of White Pine Camp. He offered a proposition to President Coolidge—to set aside 20 vaults of the proposed $2,000,000 Archives Building in order to preserve for posterity historical films. Spokesman Coolidge expressed himself as favorably impressed with the idea, pointed out how educational it would be if this generation could observe President Lincoln delivering his Gettysburg address. The little man, no stranger to Presidents, was Movie Monarch ...

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is taking flak this week for his use of the term "tar baby" while addressing a group of Iowa Republicans on July 29 in a reference to Boston's troubled Big Dig highway project. Was he offensive in doing so? The head of the NAACP, Bruce Gordon, believes the governor "made a bad choice" in using such a term, the civil-rights leader told the Boston Herald. But Romney has his defenders as well, among ...

Jack White works in an office. Until the White Stripes' formal dissolution in February, White was the singer, guitarist and songwriter for one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Now he sits at a desk. White, 35, owns and operates Third Man Records, a music store, concert venue and record label in Nashville. He spends his days clicking away at a Mac desktop and talking on a landline phone with too many buttons. This particular Saturday, though, White ...

Sugary white sand gleams under the bright Yucatn sun, aquamarine water teems with tropical fish and lazy sea turtles, cold Mexican beer beckons beneath the shady thatch of palapas — it's hard to imagine a sweeter spot than Akumal, Mexico, to contemplate the joys of being alive. And that was precisely the agenda when three leading psychologists gathered in this Mexican paradise to plot a new direction for psychology. For most of its history, psychology had concerned itself with all ...

Cinderella is beguiling proof that Walt Disney still knows his way around fairyland. Harking back to the style of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , a small army of Disney craftsmen has given the centuries-old Cinderella story* a dewy radiance and comic verve that should make children feel like elves and adults feel like children. In rich but delicately tinted Technicolor, Cinderella is unalloyed make-believe, without the disenchanting sight of a single photographed human face. It embellishes the ...

Silly me. I had naively assumed that when a writer as well known and respected as Lerone Bennett Jr. came out with a provocative book arguing that Abraham Lincoln was a racist who kept more blacks in bondage than he ever emancipated, it would kick up a stir. After all, Bennett, the executive editor of Ebony and the author of such works of black history as Before the Mayflower , has long been one of America's most eloquent voices on ...

Sugary white sand gleams under the bright yucatan sun, aquamarine water teems with tropical fish and lazy sea turtles, cold Mexican beer beckons beneath the shady thatch of palapas—it's hard to imagine a sweeter spot than Akumal, Mexico, to contemplate the joys of being alive. And that was precisely the agenda when three leading psychologists gathered in this Mexican paradise to plot a new direction for psychology. For most of its history, psychology had concerned itself with all that ails ...

After more than a year of bitter political debate and seemingly inescapable congressional deadlock, President Obama sat down in the White House East Room on March 23 and signed the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law with a stroke of his pen. And then another pen. And another. Obama used 22 pens to sign the landmark $938 billion health care bill. It would seem that either the President has an undiagnosed case of OCD ...

To the members of the National Security Council, seated around the coffin-shaped table in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the President of the U.S. said with quiet anger: "I've gone far enough. I've had enough of this." And so, in response to a murderous series of Communist attacks against U.S. military forces and installations in South Viet Nam, President Lyndon Johnson gave the orders that on three different days last week sent American and Vietnamese warplanes smashing ...

Ronald Reagan preaches "a New Beginning," but Americans trying to envision his Administration sometimes find their minds drifting back to the 1950s. Ike, they tell themselves. Maybe, if he won, Ronald Reagan would turn into a kind of Eisenhower. Or at any rate, maybe the effect would be the same: a long quiescence, an essentially sane and minimalist White House presiding over a "normality" that the nation has not experienced for a generation. Even some voters who are chilled by ...