Jon Meacham

John Edwards had just changed his shirt—blue for blue—and opened a Diet Sunkist orange soda. It was a hot New Hampshire day late in the summer, and Jonathan Darman and I had gone up to check in on Edwards's retail political performances.

Holly Bailey, at least, is not stunned by Mike Huckabee's surge. Holly, who coauthored our cover profile of Huckabee with Michael Isikoff, has been following the former Arkansas governor and Southern Baptist minister for months. "The fact that Mike Huckabee is rising in the polls isn't a surprise to me or many of the reporters who have been covering his campaign since the summer," Holly says. "The first time I ever interviewed Huckabee was at the Iowa State Fair, when he was basically written...

The candidate would do well to recall the work of the Founders in his speech on religion.

The story of the making of this week's cover story is a fairly common one at NEWSWEEK. There was careful planning for months—and then, with the deadline approaching, we got excited about a new angle and quickly changed course.

The first book I can remember holding—holding, not reading—was a copy of "Treasure Island," which had been inscribed to me by an overly enthusiastic grandfather on the occasion of my turning a month old.

In 1966, Tom Brokaw moved to Los Angeles to work for NBC News. Born in 1940, "a child of the 1950s, with a foot in the '60s," he found himself face to face with the contradictory cultural forces that would shape the next four decades.

He has the money and the message to upend 2008. Michael Bloomberg's American odyssey.

He is always in motion. Last Thursday evening, in Washington's ornate Union Station on Capitol Hill, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg spoke to a dinner for Conservation International on how to address climate change.

With the possible exceptions of who assigns the arrows in the Conventional Wisdom Watch and where to send My Turn submissions, the question we are asked most frequently is how we decide what goes on the cover.

Two months ago, we launched a reporting project to test the hypothesis that Pakistan—not Iran, not Iraq, not North Korea—is now the most dangerous nation in the world.

We have two pieces of news close to home: a redesign of the magazine and of NEWSWEEK.com. Our renovations come at an interesting time for journalism. As the number of news outlets expands, it is said, attention spans shrink; only the fast and the pithy will survive.

Kathy Deveny is big enough to admit it: "I have been a closet Paris addict for years, and I can't read enough about these chicks--Paris, Britney, Lindsay Lohan," she says. "They're young, beautiful and do whatever the hell they want.

Skepticism—not cynicism, but a healthy wariness—is a reasonable reaction when you hear journalists engage in hyperbolitis ("more than ever before" is a good signal phrase of the affliction).

Mitt Romney wants to make clear—respectfully but unmistakably—that he is not George W. Bush. Aboard his campaign plane last week in California, en route from Redding to Hayward, Jonathan Darman and Lisa Miller asked Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, what distinguishes him from the incumbent president. "Our life experience is quite different in terms of the kinds of enterprises we were involved in," Romney said. "I was 10 years in the consulting business.

It did not take long. Only 4 months old, Jennifer Mansua has already been infected by the malaria parasite. Her mother, Cecilia Nakabu, brought her child to the Kintampo Health Research Centre in central Ghana, where Shaul Schwarz took the picture of mother and daughter that appears on our cover this week.

Did the Fed cause the real-estate bubble to burst? Are we entering a recession? And who should be our next president? A candid conversation.

For two decades, from his appointment by President Reagan in 1987 to his retirement from the Federal Reserve in 2006, Alan Greenspan communicated in what even he calls "Fedspeak"—a separate language that is opaque, technical and nearly always cryptic. (In the land of Fedspeak, "irrational exuberance" was a model of clear expression.) It was with more than a little trepidation, then, that I began to read the manuscript pages of Greenspan's new memoir, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a...

The interview had just begun when Hillary Clinton got to the heart of the matter. For our cover on how a new President Clinton might govern, Jonathan Darman asked her: "As someone who's watched a president up close, what do you understand that the rest of us can't know?" Clinton's answer was straightforward.

Stories from the world of technology about the latest man or machine that will forever alter the way we live now (such is the hyperbolic language journalists can fall back on when contemplating a newly minted Silicon Valley gazillionaire or a shiny gadget) are fairly familiar.

Twenty summers ago, in 1987, as the shadows fell on the Reagan years, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, E. D. Hirsch, published a surprise best seller: "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know." (It was No. 2 on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction list in June 1987.) Hirsch's basic argument: that every reader needs to be conversant with certain terms and facts in order to make sense of what is written and discussed in the public sphere.The book was not even...

I was reminded of one of the joys of this job one afternoon last week. The sun was sinking over the West Side of Manhattan when I sat down to read the essays that make up the Special Report on "What You Need to Know" in this issue.

'I'm comfortable in an insurgent's role,' says McCain. That's a good thing, because that's the role he's in.

It was the spring of 1955, a year after Brown vs. Board of Education, and David Halberstam wanted to be where the action was.  Fresh from Harvard College, he set out for the Deep South, for a reporter's job on the paper in tiny West Point, Miss. 

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On a Saturday evening in Georgetown in late 1946, the columnist Joe Alsop was giving a dinner at his house in the 2700 block of Dumbarton. The guests were predictably drawn from the glamorous and the powerful; Supreme Court justices, ambassadors and influential journalists frequently came to Alsop's table.

She remembered the sound of splashing, then the shot. It was the early 1920s, and my grandmother, then a small girl, was being given a bath by an aunt who had come to stay with the family while my great-grandmother battled what was called "melancholia." As the little girl played in the tub, her mother slipped away to another part of the house, took a pistol and killed herself.I was told the story in the way of warning: depression ran in the family.

Our history with Iran is, to say the least, a checkered one. In the 1950s, under President Eisenhower, a CIA operation restored a pro-American shah to power; in the 1960s, the Ayatollah Khomeini was exiled; in the 1970s, the Islamic Revolution toppled the shah, Khomeini took control of the country and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, helping elect Ronald Reagan and George Bush (an event that made the presidency of George W.

It was, apparently, a grim session. As Michael Hirsh and Richard Wolffe report this week, President Bush asked some GOP senators to come to the White House to talk about the deployment of 21,000 more troops to Baghdad.

He is just 14, but already sounds like someone who has seen much, and feels much, and resents much. A soldier in the Mahdi Army, the militia controlled by the Shiite strongman Moq-tada al-Sadr, Ali Sadkhan lives in the Shia holy city of Karbala.

In the Spring of 1986, Pat Wingert joined NEWSWEEK's Washington bureau after nearly a decade of reporting for two Chicago newspapers. Her first assignment was to work with a new writer in New York, Barbara Kantrowitz, on a story about how more American families were reacting to fears about airline terrorism by taking old-fashioned car vacations.