Other writing.

The long-hidden drafts of Condoleezza Rice’s remarks offer a portrait of a lost world—and some lessons for the present.

In his undelivered final speech, Kennedy warned the world against “voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality.”

As a speechwriter, I loved writing jokes for events where politicians were able to sit down together in an atmosphere of laughter and self-deprecation. But those days are gone.

This week, Democrats completed, as was said more than once, an “unconventional convention.” Hopefully, it provided a look at the future president. But it definitely provided a look at the future of political rhetoric.

The first memoir by an Obama speechwriter adds to a storied genre while avoiding its usual cynicism.

Reboots of classic films that might appeal to the cultural critic-in-chief.

We asked former Republican speechwriter Barton Swaim and Democratic speechwriter Jeffrey Nussbaum to write a ​totally pandering bipartisan stump speech for an imaginary presidential candidate — one who ​espouses only positions that a majority of voters agree with. ​Here’s the speech they wrote, including notes to explain their phrasing, behind-the-scenes tips on appealing to voters and the data they used to decide which positions to take.

Self-deprecation is mostly absent from the 2016 campaign.

We asked Democratic speechwriter Jeff Nussbaum to write a totally pandering stump speech for an imaginary Democratic presidential candidate — one who espouses only positions that a majority of Democrats agree with.

In this piece, which was revised and expanded to become a chapter in “Undelivered,” we learn about the night New York saved itself from bankruptcy, and the speech that Mayor Abe Beame never had to deliver

Now, ladies and gentlemen of the committee, your phones and iPads may say, DESIGNED IN CALIFORNIA BY APPLE — but if you want to find the vat of molten metal that actually made the thing, you’d better get your sweet ass to Foxconn City. And I’ll tell you another thing, it’s hard enough to lure a Terminator halfway across town. You try getting one to Shenzen, China.

A hundred years ago, the National Football League curtailed on-field deaths and unnecessary brutality with a game-changing set of rules. It's time to institute some new ones.

When Jeff Nussbaum stood up to deliver a toast at his sister’s wedding, he opened with this doozy: “The first time Scott showed up at the door, I thought, ‘J.Crew usually just sends a catalog.’ ” That single line reveals two facts about Nussbaum. He has an extremely preppy brother-in-law and, man, does he know how to start a speech.

Why is it that Washington evokes all sorts of laughter, but does so little laughing itself?

Humor is hard. Not just hard to write, but hard to categorize. In his introduction, Johnson assembles a truly enlightening and readable history of humor. He describes one of the earliest recorded dirty jokes, found in the Bible. He investigates the revulsion that puns tend to engender among humorists (and then shows those humorists to be hypocrites by citing their own punning ways).

What “Last Words” ultimately reveals is how Carlin became a political protester, slam poet, cynic, polemicist and performance artist whose messages were delivered under the veneer of humor.

The real fun in this book comes less when the writers talk about their craft and more when they talk about their careers, experiences, disappointments and favorite jokes. That's when you feel like you’ve been ushered into an exclusive fraternity (and it really is a fraternity — only two women are interviewed) and exposed to the admiration and competition inherent in any club.

Words alone are no substitute for an appointee’s credentials or a witness’s case. But the quality of a piece of testimony can help determine whether a congressional hearing goes smoothly or degenerates into a show trial.

Sure, China can make our toys (preferably unleaded), Japan can make our cars, India can take our call centers and Saudi Arabia can take our gas money. Even our baseballs — not to mention most of our players — are made in the Caribbean. But when American workers want to lament all of these things, they should be able to do so while cracking open a mediocre mass-market American brew.