Twelve years ago I wrote a piece for the Nieman Watchdog chastising my former news colleagues for laziness in writing that it took 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate. My point was that by writing that, rather than saying it took 51 votes to pass a bill, they were misleading readers. Then,…

Our text for today is taken from “Six Crises,” an early memoir written in 1962 by a former vice president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. In the book, Nixon discusses six events involving him that he chose to characterize in a melodramatic way as “crises”. The wisdom he imparts from these experiences is…