Matt Doesn’t Get It

Wrong: Meanwhile, Noam Scheiber writes about reporters’ efforts to get their hands on a copy of Barack Obama’s senior thesis, all copies of which have apparently gone missing from Columbia. The thesis was about nuclear negotiating strategies of the United States during the Cold War, and Obama’s professor says it’s unlikely to be controversial, and Noam concedes that it’s an “exceedingly small deal” but still that “your default posture as a journalist, rather than a partisan or an operative, is that you always want more insight into the person your covering. I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable for us to push to see a project that Obama labored on for a year.” This is worth wondering about. When I was in college, I wrote a senior thesis. It was even, in a sense, on a politically relevant topic having to do with John Rawls’... [read full story]