Tag: Barack Obama

“U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.”

Fifty years ago, the Freedom of Information Act gave the public access to government secrets — all you had to do was ask. How a simple request became a bureaucratic nightmare.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw offers a sharp rebuke to those who would declare our country “post-racial.”

Nine stories that explain the fraught history of the holiday, and the need for celebration. 

The author offers insights into the 44th President of the United States after interviewing over 1,000 people for Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden is an Obama appointee who embodies the calm, measured wisdom of the 44th President.

Jeanne Marie Laskas goes behind the scenes in the White House mailroom where “50 staff members, 36 interns, and a rotating roster of 300 volunteers” read and processed the 10,000 emails and letters President Barack Obama received each day during his eight-year presidency.

Of all the articles written about Obama over the years, the ones that intrigued me most were the ones that helped me get to know the man and what he stood for, just a little bit better. With this reading list we remember the man, his time in office, and take a peek at what’s in store after the White House.

At The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reports on how reading and writing helped President Obama to “slow down and get perspective” from novelists, memoirists, and historical figures during the eight years of his presidency.

Charles Pierce, writing in Esquire, on President Obama’s Democratic National Convention Speech and uniquely American brand of “cool.”

[Not single-page] The origins and consequences of the Obama administration’s focus on drone strikes to kill enemy combatants: Of course, the danger of the Lethal Presidency is that the precedent you establish is hardly ever the precedent you think you are establishing, and whenever you seem to be describing a program that is limited and […]

Excerpt from Maraniss’s new biography of the president. A look at Obama’s early twenties in New York, from the perspective of his girlfriend at the time: Genevieve was out of her mother’s Upper East Side apartment by then. Earlier that spring she had moved and was sharing the top floor of a brownstone at 640 […]