This collection represents the last 20 or so years of my work at Newsweek, with a special emphasis on historical context, media analysis and personal observation. Most are columns about the great stories of our time-from the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 to the presidential campaign of 2008. In between came the Bushes, the Clintons, Newt Gingrich, the O.J. Simpson case and other tabloid distractions, impeachment, the disputed 2000 election, the events of 9/11, the Iraq War and the end of conservative dominance, among many other compelling stories.

I begin with my brushes with historical figures from before my time, like Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon, then move through profiles ranging from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Warren Beatty, and end with personal essays on everything from my bout with cancer to my experience in customer service hell.

I was born at the peak of the baby boom, 1957, on the North Side of Chicago, just a few blocks from Wrigley Field, the second of four children. Our family life was steeped in civic activism. My father Jim ran a family-owned wholesale distributorship of refrigeration and air conditioning parts, and my mother Joanne entered the jungle of Chicago politics and in 1972 became the first woman Democrat elected to public office in Cook County, Illinois. I worked in political campaigns and on newspapers as a kid, graduated from Harvard in 1979 with a degree in American history and got my best training at the Washington Monthly, an outstanding small political magazine.

I joined Newsweek in 1983, at age 25, and the late Maynard Parker, then the editor, gave me my own column in 1991. Because this was the first political column inside the pages of the magazine in more than 40 years (not including the back page), it was an experiment at first and closely tied to the news. Even now, I don't simply write on whatever catches my fancy. With space in the magazine still tight, the idea must fit with our overall coverage. The advent of Newsweek.com in the late 1990s eased space constraints considerably, and several of the pieces here first appeared on the web.

For my first several years at the magazine, I was a New York-based writer. That meant that I often wrote cover stories and inside "take-outs" based on dispatches from other Newsweek correspondents as well as on my own reporting. (I still do this occasionally.) I have not included any of those shared-byline stories, and only a few of the hundreds of straight news and feature stories I covered. They're too perishable. I've also skipped most of my columns that were closely tied to the news, like those about media ethics flaps, the horse-race of presidential politics or some long-forgotten political tussle in Washington with no larger point. My foreign trips and Q and A's with world leaders get short shrift because others cover those assignments better. I've broken several stories over the years, but there's nothing more stale than yesterday's scoop.

Almost all of the articles collected here appear as they did in Newsweek. I've deleted some references to "last week" and made a few other minor editing changes, especially when parts of columns were overtaken by events. But I wanted to capture events mostly as they seemed at the time. In fact, I've included a couple of examples where I appear shortsighted to show that my betting average is hardly perfect. Many columns I like could not be included because of space constraints. For most of the ones I've selected, I've added a few sentences of context to introduce them.

Jonathan Alter
Montclair, New Jersey
December 2007