SUKAHARA

“Message from President George Washington Regarding Recess Appointments,” 2/9/1790 

File Unit: Records Relating to Executive Nominations from the 1st Congress, 1789 - 1791. Series: Executive Nominations, 1789 - 2002. Record Group 46: Records of the U.S. Senate, 1789 - 2015. 

On July 17th, former President Obama delivered the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, in Johannesburg. The lecture came not long after Donald Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. The talk was Obama’s most extensive reflection so far on the current political climate, though it did not once mention Trump by name. The lecture is edited, but not much.—David Remnick

Read it here. 

On Tuesday, when Barack Obama walked onto a stage in Johannesburg to deliver the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, commemorating the centenary of the former South African President’s birth, he offered the sharpest possible contrast between himself and his successor—between statesman and demagogue—and, crucially, the distinction between a man who grasps history as the living context of our lives and one unburdened by the knowledge of how we arrived at the present and what that means for the future.

Evangelical minister Rob Schenck was once a militant leader of the anti-abortion movement, blockading access to clinics to prevent doctors and patients from entering.

But after more than 20 years in the movement, Schenck experienced a change of heart. Though firm in his evangelicalism, he has disavowed his militant anti-abortion stance – he talks about the change in a new memoir, Costly Grace, and you can check out his conversation with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross here.