Politico

Deeply reported look at the power struggle inside Michael Bloomberg’s media business as he returns to lead it.

Newly declassified documents help shed light on the Eisenhower-era story of how Israel hid their secret nuclear project in the Negev Desert.

“My friends and I locked eyes in stunned silence. Between the four adults, we hold six degrees. Three of us are journalists. And not one of us had thought to call the police. We had not even considered it.
We also are all black. And without realizing it, in that moment, each of us had made a set of calculations, an instantaneous weighing of the pros and cons.”

How the Federal Bureau of Narcotics—an early predecessor of the Drug Enforcement Administration—targeted jazz, and Lady Day herself.

An investigation into how Border Patrol became America’s most out-of-control law enforcement agency.

Can a university step in where a city fell down? John Fry, the president of Drexel University, is out to prove just that.

In 1989, Ruben Castaneda was an ambitious young reporter at the Washington Post, covering the downfall of then-Mayor Marion Barry. And like Barry, Castaneda also had a double life.

How Born in the U.S.A. transformed Bruce Springsteen himself from a relatively apolitical performer from an avowedly working-class background to a passionate advocate for the rights of the disenfranchised— all thanks to Ronald Reagan.

In 1984, President Reagan was running for his second term. Early on, his team had decided that the president’s core supporters would vote for him no matter what. The reelection campaign would therefore be more about wooing moderate and independent voters than about shoring up the committed Republican base. It would be about images rather than issues and would attempt to co-opt as much of mainstream U.S. culture as it could. If rock ‘n’ roll had been anathema to an earlier Republicans like former vice president Spiro Agnew—or even to then-current, musically clueless Secretary of the Interior James Watt—it was perfectly fine with most of the Reagan re-election team, particularly if the music in question could be viewed as inspirational. “If we allow any Democrat to claim optimism or idealism as his issue,” one adviser noted very early in the campaign’s planning, “we will lose the election.”

The Founders never intended to create an unregulated individual right to a gun. Today, millions believe they did. Here’s how it happened.

“A fraud on the American public.” That’s how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amendment gives an unfettered individual right to a gun. When he spoke these words to PBS in 1990, the rock-ribbed conservative appointed by Richard Nixon was expressing the longtime consensus of historians and judges across the political spectrum.

Twenty-five years later, Burger’s view seems as quaint as a powdered wig. Not only is an individual right to a firearm widely accepted, but increasingly states are also passing laws to legalize carrying weapons on streets, in parks, in bars—even in churches.

Inside the lonely life of an Obama Cabinet member:

“We are completely marginalized … until the shit hits the fan,” says one former Cabinet deputy secretary, summing up the view of many officials I interviewed. “If your question is: Did the president rely a lot on his Cabinet as a group of advisers? No, he didn’t,” says former Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Little wonder, then, that Obama has called the group together only rarely, for what by most accounts are not much more than ritualistic team-building exercises: According to CBS News White House reporter Mark Knoller, the Cabinet met 19 times in Obama’s first term and four times in the first 10 months of his second term. That’s once every three months or so—about as long as you can drive around before you’re supposed to change your oil.