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We’re pleased to announce that this article, originally posted on September 14, 2004, has won the Deadline Club’s Online News Exclusive for 2005, beating out Newsday and Business Week.

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

I. It’s My Birthday and I’ll Lie if I Need To

Auden had in mind the secondary worlds of literature, but as the Arendt quote indicates, his idea has wider application.

Back in the fog of war in Vietnam, LBJ super suckup Jack Valenti let the world know how he felt.

With the candidates in the bag, and no hope of drama, the Democratic and Republican conventions can be fairly judged only as extended advertisements for the parties that staged them.

In years past, the cronies of Gen.

The bloody end to the hostage crisis in Beslan resulted in unfathomable human suffering.

The price we are paying for George W. Bush’s unnecessary and illegal war in Iraq keeps rising: The number of Americans killed in the war has now passed the 1,000 mark.

Who would you rather have in your corner, Sasso or Baker?

(Karl Rove & Co. knock off Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away”)

Walking through the retrospective exhibition of Lee Bontecou, on view at MoMA-Queens, is uncannily like visiting an out-of-the-way museum of natural history, as if her entire work to date had bee

Conspiracy theories are hard to kill.

Caught up in a metaphorical swoon
by the oversoul in his head
War is on its last legs, he said.
The question is only How Soon.

Stalin continues to fascinate–the central mystery within the riddle inside the enigma that was the Soviet Union. If you Google “Stalin, biography,” 166,000 websites come up.

In the spring of 1960, the year of his death, the novelist Richard Wright wrote from Paris to his friend and Dutch translator Margrit de Sablonière: