Laughing at Democracy at the Mall

Marty Kaplan is one smart guy. He is now the director of the Norman Lear Center for the study of entertainment and society at the Annenberg School of the University of Southern California. The rest of his resume is embarrassing to the rest of us: He graduated summa cum laude in molecular biology from Harvard, received a first in English at Cambridge, earned a Ph.D. in modern thought from Stanford and, as a vice president of Disney, wrote a movie for Eddie Murphy. He has this theory about entertainment taking over the news, even the world. At the blackboard, he……Continue Reading Laughing at Democracy at the Mall

Businessman of the World Unite

LOS ANGELES — In the early 1980s, in a book called American Journey, I calculated that American corporate chief executive officers were making 30 to 40 times as much as they paid average production workers. Looking back at that, I see that I was surprised to learn that that ratio had increased from 25-to-1 in 1970 — and that in other developed countries the ratio was closer to 10-to-1. It seems now that I was easily shocked in the good old days. Today that compensation ratio goes from 300-to-1 to almost 1,000-to-1 in the United States, if you count various……Continue Reading Businessman of the World Unite

Reeves mentioned in NYT Wikileaks op-ed

Senior Fellow Richard Reeves was mentioned in The New York Times in an op-ed piece by Frank Rich making the comparison of the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to the recent publishing of classified documents on the website Wikileaks on the failures in the Afghan war. In Rich's piece, President Nixon by Richard Reeves is referenced, and his book, Reeves revealed that though the Pentagon Papers were labeled "top secret", over 700,000 individuals had access to them…….Continue Reading Reeves mentioned in NYT Wikileaks op-ed

Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls

BELL, Calif. — This little city was a pleasant place to be last Sunday morning. There are nice gardens around small bungalows and four-family apartment buildings. Hundreds of kids in snappy soccer uniforms, their parents behind carrying coolers of food and drink, were headed for the perfectly groomed turf near City Hall. It's a very nice City Hall, red brick, with a park and community center next door, along with the restored house of James George Bell, the founder of the town in 1876. Of course it's changed a bit since then. More than 35,000 people live here now, 90……Continue Reading Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls

Daring Young Men named “Best History Book”

Senior Fellow Richard Reeves' book Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of The Berlin Airlift-June 1948 – May 1949 has been named the "Best History Book" of the past year by the Book of the Month Club. The book is also on the required reading list issued annually by the Air Force Chief of Staff. Here is a small excerpt from Reeves' acclaimed book: The Newsweek headline was "dateline germany, 1948: the Big Retreat." The dispatch below was from James O'Donnell, the magazine's Berlin bureau chief, reporting on the exodus of American and British officials and soldiers from the……Continue Reading Daring Young Men named “Best History Book”

Obama So Far: Good Job!

Senior Fellow Richard Reeves latest article on RealClearPolitics examines the practices of President Barack Obama during his presidency thus far. "Sometimes good, sometimes bad. The guy drives me nuts at times," is his usual response to how he feels about the President's job performance. The article was written as a reply to Froma Harrop in the Providence Journal…….Continue Reading Obama So Far: Good Job!