The New Republic

Justices and Journalists: The U.S. Supreme Court and the Media By Richard Davis (Cambridge University Press, 241 pp., $28.99) READ MORE >>

Peter Baker's splashy new NYT magazine piece focuses in part on Obama's newly-visible counterterrorism chief: READ MORE >>

Having peered behind the red velvet curtains of the Rehnquist Court, the press now tells the embarrassed justices that they have nothing to be embarrassed about. But after spending last week in the Marshall archives, I sympathize with William Rehnquist's fears. The portrait of the justices that emerges from their internal correspondence is not, in fact, particularly flattering. Far from showing a scholarly Court "communicating in utmost sincerity," as The New York Times put it, the papers reveal that the justices rarely communicate in writing about the substance of their work. READ MORE >>

Q&A Tri-Star There are fashions in slurs. When I was a schoolboy in New York in the 1920s, just at the end of the great wave of immigration to America, most of the slurs were national. Derogatory terms for Swedes, Irishmen, Hungarians, Poles, Germans, and Greeks, among others, were common; and of course each derogated group used slurs about the others. As time moved, as second and third generations were born, national slurring diminished. READ MORE >>