Jon Meacham

The South tends to exemplify, if sometimes in an exaggerated way, much of what the nation thinks and feels.

History has always been a tactile thing to me, and I like to think that I come by it honestly. I grew up on Missionary Ridge, a Civil War battlefield where you could still find Minié balls in the ground and in trees more than a century after Union troops broke the Confederate line in the autumn of 1863.

One of the pleasures of my job is tormenting—or at least trying to torment—my friend and colleague Marc Peyser,our arts editor. Marc is a brilliant man, a keen writer and a gifted editor, but he also has a strong streak of Charlie Brown in him.

The forces that shaped Tim Russert's life and career.

By any conventional political measurement, the presidential campaign of 2008, which we now know will be fought between John McCain and Barack Obama, should not be much of a contest.

The interview—about the Bush administration's record on protecting endangered species—was over, and Daniel Stone, who works in our Washington bureau, was about to leave Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne's office when Kempthorne asked Stone to step out on the office balcony, which has, Dan says, "the kind of view you can really only get in Washington by political appointment.

For those who support Barack Obama, our cover this week may seem yet another examination of their candidate's problems with white voters. For those who support John McCain, raising the race factor can suggest that those who oppose Obama are implicitly or even explicitly racist.The issue you are holding, however, is neither redundant punditry about what we recently referred to as "Obama's Bubba Gap," nor is it pre-emptive hand-wringing about how the race card might get played in the months to...

As opening sentences go, the one Mary Carmichael wrote for this week's cover is one of the more chilling I can remember: "Max Blake was 7 the first time he tried to kill himself."Thus begins Mary's account of the Blake family's struggle with Max's bipolar disorder, a serious mental illness typified by recurring bouts of mania and depression.

Perhaps naively, I have always been skeptical of what you might call the Gibbonization of America—that we are, like Rome, fated to inevitable decline. Admittedly, history offers little support for my view that things are rarely as bad as people think they are, but there is a dangerous solipsism in the tendency to believe that the problems of the day are inherently more difficult and intractable than those that faced earlier generations.

Laura and Jenna Bush talk reading, teaching and their new book, 'Read All About It'—along with how time flies in the White House.

Political campaigns are fascinating for the same reasons great novels are: both feature characters driven and buffeted by ambition, love and pride. And as in literature, scope is important in politics, for the higher the stakes, the more pitched the story.

An Anglican theologian explains that the resurrection really happened—and that the Kingdom is really coming.

Last September, American-led troops discovered a trove of documents in an insurgent headquarters in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar. The papers cataloged 606 militants who had come to Iraq from abroad.

Jerry Adler, who writes for us about the environment, science, ideas and—well, Jerry has a gift for writing on just about everything—has what one could very safely call a dry sense of humor.

A few months ago, Julia Baird, the editor who oversees our science and family coverage, kept coming across stories about Americans (and Brits) going to India to look for surrogates—stories that were prompting angry online debates about the ethics of outsourcing childbearing to the developing world.

Last Wednesday, after Ohio and Texas, we were confronting a perennial question: what to do to make the new issue add to the sum of human knowledge—or at least to illuminate a subject, the presidential campaign, in which our readers are immersed.

Faith, the Founding Fathers and the unlikely rise of religious freedom.

The note was unexpected, brief and witty. A few years ago, in The New York Times Book Review, I wrote about a book of William F. Buckley Jr.'s (one of his 50), a "literary autobiography" titled "Miles Gone By." I had found the book charming, and said so.

Why the New York mayor isn't running for president.

Addiction knows no social or geographic boundaries: what John Cheever called "The Sorrows of Gin" are democratic in their destructiveness. I know few people who have not been affected in some way by addiction—in the world where I grew up, the drug of choice was usually alcohol, with a large side of nicotine—and I suspect the same is true for many of you.It has long been unfashionable to think of addiction as a failure of character or of willpower.

Politicians' marriages are not very different from yours or mine: ultimately mysterious to everyone on the outside, and probably somewhat mysterious to the two people on the inside.

No one I know really likes being criticized. At our best we acknowledge the utility of differing views, but hearing about our shortcomings is still emotionally taxing.

"Rebels often make good warriors," Evan Thomas was saying to John McCain late last week in Los Angeles. "What is it about that rebellious streak that makes good fighters?""I think if you can channel it—and it took me a long time to channel it, as you well know—and mature with it, then I think it's an attribute," McCain replied.

Wandering around the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Daniel Gross noticed that things felt different—especially for Americans. "In normal times, Davos—which attracts Type A's the way Florida attracts retirees—isn't very relaxing," Daniel said. "But this year, it was particularly not relaxing because of the turmoil in the global markets all week.

For many, the rise of Ronald Reagan happened the day before yesterday. But it has, in fact, been a long while: the Battle of Britain and Tet Offensive are as proximate in time as we are to 1980.

Fighting for her political life, she has found her voice. How the historic Clinton-Obama contest is raising questions of race, gender and power.

It was not a smart assumption, the senator says in an interview, for her or her staff to think voters knew the real Hillary Clinton from her Senate campaigns.

After a NEWSWEEK cover shoot directed by Simon Barnett at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles on Friday, Hillary Clinton was on her way to a nearby union event.

Why McCain's resurgence is good news for American politics.

There was broken glass on the floor and garbage bags of shredded documents in the stairwells. On a sunny day in Beijing in 1999—dusty, of course, but still bright—Melinda Liu and I were being given a tour of the ravaged American Embassy in the Chinese capital.