Peter Savodnik

2 months ago | thefp.com | Peter Savodnik

Welcome to “Things Worth Remembering,” in which writers recall nuggets of wisdom from history that we should commit to heart. This week, after Donald Trump spoke of securing a peace deal in Ukraine, Peter Savodnik remembers a great speech given by George H.W. Bush in that same country in 1991. Back then, it was seen as controversial, but the “Chicken Kiev” speech, as it came to be known, is now a blueprint for how America can support democracy abroad without becoming the world’s policeman.

2 months ago | thefp.com | Peter Savodnik

This Progressive Has a Plan to Win Trump’s Base. Steve Bannon Calls It ‘Brilliant.’Ro Khanna is picking fights with J.D. Vance and says he has a vision for the ‘forgotten Americans.’ Does he have what it takes? Earlier this week, Ro Khanna, the California congressman, picked a fight with the vice president of the United States. It happened, like everything else, on X.

2 months ago | thefp.com | Peter Savodnik

In June 2020—a little over two years after the billionaire surgeon Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times—the newspaper embarked on what it called a “painful internal reckoning.”It was similar to other painful internal reckonings at other American institutions in the immediate wake of George Floyd’s death.

2 months ago | thefp.com | Peter Savodnik

Rename Mount McKinley? Sarah Palin and Other Real Alaskans Weigh In‘I have two nieces—one named McKinley, the other is Denali.’A few years ago, my wife and I spent the night at the Denali Overlook Inn, which, like so many Alaska getaways, is beautiful, spare and, in the summer, overflowing with sixty- and seventy-something males with rifles and fishing poles, seemingly in search of their inner frontiersmen.

Jan 20, 2025 | thefp.com | Peter Savodnik

On January 20, 2009, a few journalists crowded into my apartment in New York, and we had brunch and cocktails, and two or three people smoked cigarettes, and we watched Barack Obama become the 44th president. It felt like a moment of great possibility. There was the obvious historical significance—Obama being sworn in in the bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth and on the same Bible Lincoln had been sworn in on, in 1861. The end of an odyssey. The overcoming of our original sin.