Articles by Robert Zaller

A very funny play called The Man Who Came to Dinner had a two-year run on Broadway in 1939-40, enjoyed international success, and became an acclaimed movie. The plot concerned an overbearing media personality who’s [ Read Article ]

America was a curiosity country in the nineteenth century, attracting such figures as Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling. By the end of the century, it was a world power. Its own elite, [ Read Article ]

So, what’s a fellow to do these days? Donald Trump was riding high a few months ago. He had what he liked to call a booming economy—booming, that is, for billionaires, with a stock market [ Read Article ]

In 2000, Vice President Al Gore conceded a disputed presidential election to George W. Bush after the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended his legal challenge to the Florida vote by the Republican State Secretary who [ Read Article ]

A recently posted comment by a CNN analyst, Stephen Collinson, seemed to me to sum up our current state of affairs: At a time of tribal politics and during a presidency that has evolved into [ Read Article ]

Donald Trump has been telling us about the Deep State for the past three years. It’s not a new idea. The Deep State, some say, was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or at [ Read Article ]

Most anniversaries wear with time. Few, however have faded as quickly as the Apollo 11 moon landing half a century ago on July 20, 1969. More than half a billion people watched it on television [ Read Article ]

Is the fate of the planet—that is, of our fate on it—tied to the fate of democracy? I think there are grounds for suggesting it. You could make a negative case for the proposition. Democracy, [ Read Article ]

What do Bill Cosby, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Leslie Moonves, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, James Levine, Charles Dutoit, Peter Martins, John Conyers, and Al Franken have in common? They are all prominent males [ Read Article ]