The once grand downtown of this city on the Ohio River is shabby, as the nation's old downtowns tend to be. Magnificent tall cast-iron-fronted buildings sit empty. So do historic brick tobacco warehouses, surrounded in razor-wire, tagged with graffiti. But the downtown of Kentucky's largest city also has a spectacular redeveloped waterfront featuring bike paths and open vistas, the spanking-new KFC Yum! sports arena, and a medical complex of several hospitals that employ nearly 20,000 people, treat tens of thousands and conduct cutting-edge research. This resurgence is a result of civic vision, pride, tenacity - and the impressive earmark performance of Louisville's Slugger: Mitch McConnell (R), Kentucky's longest-serving senator and the powerful Senate minority leader.

In 1970, the tumult that had engulfed so many college campuses for a decade reached even Ivy-covered Yale University. But by then, a 22-year-old senior named Garry Trudeau had already begun to chronicle the steps and missteps of his generation, in just four panels a day. Before he graduated, the strip (now named "Doonesbury") became nationally syndicated - a comic strip utterly unlike anything seen in American newspapers. It was sold, its creator recalls, as "dispatches from the front lines of the counterculture . . . reporting from the trenches, and that it had a kind of generational authenticity."...

To witness Keith Olbermann - the most opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts - suspended even briefly last week for making financial contributions to Democratic political candidates seemed like a whimsical, arcane holdover from a long-gone era of television journalism, when the networks considered the collection and dissemination of substantive and unbiased news to be a public trust...

In July 2009, after a cliff-hanger of an election and an ugly court battle over the results, Al Franken finally arrived in the United States Senate. Eager to lay the groundwork for legislative accomplishments, the author of Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot looked for common ground with his new GOP colleagues. In the case of Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, that common ground was music. In addition to his senatorial career, Hatch is a prolific songwriter—he has written odes to John McCain, America, Hanukkah, and Princess Diana, among other subjects—and so Franken approached him and asked to hear a few tunes...

Three years and three weeks ago. Dusk was falling fast on the Korengal Valley. We were crouched on a shrub-laden plateau some 8,000 feet up in the mountains. The soldiers were exhausted and cold. We’d been sleeping in ditches for five nights. Insurgents were everywhere...

Stories of terror and beauty from the world's largest accidental offshore oil disaster...

Forty years ago this morning, nerdy freshman Mike Doonesbury met his roommate at Walden College, and since that day, the funny pages haven't been the same. Created in the throes of '60s and '70s counterculture, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip blurred the lines between comics and the editorial pages, and produced some of the most memorable cartoon characters ever sketched...

I can’t stop thinking about the elections. Last weekend I saw “127 Hours,” and all I could think about was that this was a metaphor for the lame-duck session of Congress...