“Henry Luce wanted to create the most beautiful and riveting picture magazine ever published, and it was that. It was a magazine that could project a vision of what America was like, or at least what he wanted America to be like. Luce believed that under everything else there was a united America. There was a single culture that everyone was part of. And that’s what Life Magazine projected into the world, a sense of a kind of consensual America. That was not an accurate picture of what America was like.”
- Alan Brinkley, author of the book: The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
“Henry Luce believed that Chiang Kai-shek was one of the great figures of history. And Luce cared so much about the future of China and of making China a sort of modern democratic nation, he saw Chiang Kai-shek as the only hope for that. But he ignored or dismissed all of the things that Chiang Kai-shek did badly, and there were many such things. Teddy White, the famous Time Magazine editor in China - they both believed in Chiang Kai-shek, but Teddy White lost that belief and began to write about Chiang Kai-shek as someone who had failed. And Luce was furious, and that led to his departure from Time, Inc.”
- Alan Brinkley, author of the book: The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
In May 2010, Maureen Corrigan wrote “A Publishing Titan’s Life and Time” for NPR. The weirdest — and maybe even the most revealing — episode in Alan Brinkley's teeming biography of Henry Luce occurred in 1960 when Luce — a publishing potentate who reigned over an empire that included Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Life magazines — experimented with LSD. Luce's second wife, the playwright, congresswoman and loose cannon, Clare Booth Luce, had already dabbled with the hallucinogen under a psychiatrist's supervision. Clare later claimed she had cajoled her husband into trying LSD to provide him with the same "serenity" the drug had given her and, thus, save their troubled marriage. Whatever the reasons, Luce took a dose and then, according to the psychiatrist's diary, sat down at his desk and began calmly reading Lionel Trilling's biography of Matthew Arnold. Even LSD couldn't whisk Henry Luce off on a magic carpet ride! No matter how much he may have yearned to attain freaky visions, Luce was always tethered to late Victorian ideas about duty and ethical culture.
“Well, to the left, in particular, especially in the '40s and '50s, when the Communist left was still a significant force, they hated these ideas that America would be the great capitalist leader of the world. But equally infuriating to readers of the magazine, who just wanted a magazine that would sound fair in the treatment of politics, in much of the '40s and '50s, Time Magazine was not fair. By 1952, there hadn't been a Republican president in 20 years, and Luce was desperate to see a Republican elected president. And he loved Eisenhower, and through the whole eight years of his presidency the magazine was constantly supporting and admiring Eisenhower. And it infuriated many readers, although not too many gave up their subscriptions.”
- Alan Brinkley, author of the book: The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
, Wililam H. Draper writes: I was born in 1982, so I was only an infant when these fateful decisions were made. But I gradually became aware that in the Draper household, money was tight. I remember, for example, that throughout my childhood, my father would invariably return the Christmas gifts that my mother bought for him, because he felt that the family needed the cash more than he needed a present. My father was by nature a hard worker, bu in those difficult years, he drove himself at a punishing pace as he struggled to hang on to his investment banking job, in the deepest and darkest economic depression that our country had ever faced.
,” by the journalist Bob Woodward, depicts an administration deeply torn over the war in Afghanistan even as the president agreed to triple troop levels there amid suspicion that he was being boxed in by the military. Mr. Obama’s top White House adviser on Afghanistan and his special envoy for the region are described as believing the strategy will not work.
), the great information empires of the 20th century have followed a clear and distinctive pattern: after the chaos that follows a major technological innovation, a corporate power intervenes and centralizes control of the new medium: the master switch. Tim Wu chronicles the turning points of the century’s information landscape: those decisive moments when a medium opens or closes, from the development of radio to the Internet revolution, where centralizing control could have devastating consequences. To Tim Wu, subjecting the information economy to the traditional methods of dealing with concentrations of industrial power is an unacceptable control of our most essential resource. He advocates not a regulatory approach but rather a constitutional approach that would enforce distance between the major functions in the information economy—between those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the venues of access—and keep corporate and governmental power in check. By fighting vertical integration, a Separations Principle would remove the temptations and vulnerabilities to which such entities are prone. The Tim Wu book is engaging, a remarkable historical narrative that makes for a compelling and galvanizing cry for sanity—and necessary deregulation—in the information age.
,on the ascent of the Red Sox, and a controversial book, 
, on the scandals of The New York Times. Now he is taking on another modern phenomenon, the movement against vaccinations. "
, wrote “An Epidemic of Ignorance” for the Wall Street Journal. Seth Mnookin's "