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Steve Carell. Stephen Colbert. Louis C.K. Charlie Kaufman. Robert Smigel. Some of comedy’s greatest minds got one of their biggest breaks on the short-lived but much-loved “The Dana Carvey Show.” Fifteen years later, in this exclusive oral history, the players recount the brief but fertile life of a truly unusual show

The tragicomic 1961 novel that sprang from Joseph Heller’s experience as a W.W. II bombardier mystified and offended many of the publishing professionals who saw it first. But thanks to a fledgling agent, Candida Donadio, and a young editor, Robert Gottlieb, it would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest anti-war books ever written. […]

A persistent man with an offer was calling, but Robert Williams had to be practical. He was turning 25, and it was time to be an adult. He had a wife to think about, plus a couple of kids. He had a stable, albeit ordinary, job in Waco, Texas, and that was just fine. See, […]

On May 7th, Robert Krulwich gave the commencement speech to Berkeley Journalism School’s Class of 2011. That’s Robert Krulwich, who hosts the singular radio show Radiolab, one of the most accomplished pieces of science broadcasting in any nation. Robert Krulwich, who won a Peabody Award for broadcast excellence a few months ago. Robert Krulwich, whose […]

Back in Washington, Mr. Panetta met with Mr. Obama and his most senior national security aides, including Mr. Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. The meeting was considered so secret that White House officials didn’t even list the topic in their alerts to each other. That day, Mr. […]

The Stellar Wind confrontation was a rare moment in presidential history, an act of defiance that turned the Commander in Chief in his tracks. “You can only do that once, threaten to resign,” says Frances Fragos Townsend, who was then Bush’s counterterrorism adviser. “The second time you do it, you’re going to be told, ‘Accepted.’” […]

I also love the book “Just Kids” by Patti Smith. I love it because it’s a story about how two friends moved to New York and learned to be artists. You know how they learned to be artists? They pretended to be artists. I’ll spoil the book for you and describe my favorite scene, the […]

Before he addressed the crowd that had assembled in the St. Louis Hyatt Regency ballroom last November, Lt. Gen. John F. Kelly had one request. “Please don’t mention my son,” he asked the Marine Corps officer introducing him. Four days earlier, 2nd Lt. Robert M. Kelly , 29, had stepped on a land mine while […]

In the end, of course, it wasn’t just the executives of Lehman and AIGFP who got passes. Virtually every one of the major players on Wall Street was similarly embroiled in scandal, yet their executives skated off into the sunset, uncharged and unfined. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million last year when it was caught defrauding […]

Then came the six-part expose published June 24th through 29th, 1990, in the Los Angeles Times, a story that conclusively divided the wheat from the chaff where Scientology rumors were concerned. Joel Sappell and Robert W. Welkos spent five years on the story and it was, and still is, a corker. The other day Sappell […]