Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.
All governments in all wars have used all the means at their disposal to put their own motives, decisions and actions, and the actions of their military forces, in the best possible light.
The media bring our wars home, but only rarely have they been able to do it in complete freedom.
Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.
They say the death of a parent puts you in time because that means there's now no generation standing between you and ordinary death: you're next. I don't buy it.
Well, I think everybody's a little jealous of the Vietnam Wall, even people from wars that already have good monuments. You have a monument like the Wall and nobody ever forgets your war, you can bet on that.
The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tel...
Vietnam is often called our only uncensored war, but that only means that the government wasn't vetting the pictures and words.
America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.
All too often, academic departments defend their territory with the passion of cornered animals, though with far less justification.
Books can now be on the stands within days from delivery of a formatted manuscript, and often are.
Both of our wars in Iraq were, on American television, largely bloodless.
Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility.
Filmmakers who use narrators pay a price for taking the easy way: narrated films date far more quickly than films without narrators.
First, those images help us understand the general and specific magnitude of disaster caused by the tsunami. The huge outpouring of aid would not have happened without those images.
It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.
The fact that the Arctic, more than any other populated region of the world, requires the collaboration of so many disciplines and points of view to be understood at all, is a benefit rather than a burden.
The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they're made things.
The mainstream media showed, for example, no blood and guts resulting from the 9/11 attacks.
I'm a schoolteacher and a writer. So that's what I do.
