For many years, I have felt that the American way of democracy, with its federalism and checks & balances, could serve as a helpful model for peoples trying to forge some way of democracy for themselves. This is especially true in countries of the developing world that have to reconcile competing and sometimes conflicting tribes and religions. The Americans on trial in Cairo obviously agreed with me and were trying to impart some aspects of the American way to Egyptians about to embark on the democratic adventure. It would be a great travesty if the Americans were jailed for their efforts. Egypt would deserve the condemnation that would surely spew forth from irate Americans if their compatriots were punished so severely. Yet there is more to the case than a clash between American idealism and Egyptian stupidity...

[OPINION] Private pro-democracy groups funded by the U.S. have a troubling history. Now that seven American pro-democracy workers have been allowed to post bail and return to the United States, perhaps we can examine what the U.S. was up to in Egypt using reason instead of patriotic emotion. The Egyptian furor over such seemingly idealistic work may strike us as wild and idiotic, but in fact, the Egyptians have a right to be suspicious. America's attempt to promote democracy around the world through private organizations has unsavory beginnings and a sometimes troubling history...

The first Kodak camera had a big influence on painting, as 'Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard' details. George Eastman introduced the first Kodak camera in 1888. It was a small wooden box covered in Morocco leather with a roll of dry film inside. You no longer had to be a professional carrying a tripod, heavy plates, a darkening cape and liquid developer to take a photograph. Any amateur could hold the box waist-high, aim at a subject like the family and press the button that released the shutter that covered the lens. The box — later just the roll — could be sent back to the company to develop the film. Kodak advertisements promised, "You press the button, we do the rest." The Kodak, continually improved by Eastman's American company, soon became a big seller. Among the enthusiasts were young painters in Europe...

An exciting survey at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. — 'Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape' — makes a spirited attempt to find and explore the artist's politics. Joan Miró, the great Spanish painter of dreams and symbols, lived through so many harrowing eras of the 20th century that critics believe his masterpieces surely reflect the tensions of political events in one way or another. But Miró's world of art was so special — with stars and moons, biomorphs and delightful dogs and sly monsters and wonderful color — that it has always been difficult to find much politics there. An exhibition that just arrived at the National Gallery of Art — "Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape" — makes a spirited attempt to find and explore the politics...

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has just announced it will soon publish no more than three times a week and devote the rest of its energies, reduced by a diminished staff, to the internet version of itself. The announcement struck me as a surrender, even a betrayal. When I was a boy I learned that the morning newspaper was a modern miracle. It arrested all the events of the world at a moment in time every day and lay them before me. It was as if the world stopped at, say, midnight so that I could stop and take in all its wonders. There was an order to this. Great editors placed the stories in a way that caught my eye and mind, holding my attention before releasing me to the lure of other stories. A wise reader could sit on top of the world for an hour or two. I sometimes felt like that and still do...

If American elections made sense, the selection of Congressman Paul Ryan as the Republican vice presidential candidate would be universally regarded as about as foolish a move as the selection of Sarah Palin four years ago. By no stretch of logic can any reasonable analyst justify the choice. Mitt Romney is so bland and clunky a candidate that for a long while we all have had a tough time figuring him out. He has been running around crying out that he is a rip-snorting genuine extreme conservative, but it was hard to take him at his word. It all sounded like election hooey. After all, he was a somewhat decent governor of Massachusetts who gave us Romneycare the model for Obamacare. A lot of people felt that once elected he would revert to his innate blandness. They also probably felt that his innate blandness might even turn into innate goodness. The embrace of Ryan changes all that...

It must have been galling for the Republicans to see so many blacks voting for their own in the 2008 presidential election. The returns must have struck many Republicans as unfair, even undemocratic. Nothing else can explain the way the Republicans have allowed racism to stain their campaign against President Obama for a second term. No one likes to throw around so nasty an accusation, but I don’t know what else it is...

The exhibition 'Shock of the News' at the National Gallery of Art in Washington looks at artists' real and figurative use of newspapers in their works, including those by Hans Richter, Ellsworth Kelly and Paul Sietsema. For a hundred years, artists have been using and abusing newspapers as a vital part of their works. Pungent examples include the Spanish painter Salvador Dali creating an absurd newspaper about himself, the German-born Swiss artist Dieter Roth making a sausage, complete with gelatin and spices, out of copies of the British tabloid Daily Mirror and the American Jim Hodges coating a Jordanian newspaper entirely in 24 karat gold. Little attention has been paid to this phenomenon by the world's museums in the past. But these examples and five dozen others now make up a novel exhibition called "Shock of the News" that opened recently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and will close Jan. 27. It goes nowhere else...

The reelection of President Barack Obama is provoking an avalanche of punditry that does not need more from me. I just want to note a handful of highlights that may get lost in the avalanche. Most important, the result averted a calamitous injustice. If Obama had lost, it would have been a victory for obstruction, lies, distortion, deceit and racism. A cynical and shameless campaign, concocted four years ago by Republicans obsessed with dishonoring the new president, would have succeeded. Supporters of Romney even put forth a campaign argument that amounted to blackmail: since the stubborn Republican House of Representatives would never work with Obama, they said, the good of the nation demanded Romney as president...

While reading The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro’s formidable biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, I found myself recalling my role in the election of 1960 when Senator John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard Nixon for president. I was a junior member of the Washington staff of the Associated Press then but nevertheless landed some juicy assignments. Since my role has been ignored by biographers and historians, from Theodore H. White to Caro, I thought it might be helpful to set down some of the details...