D(ECLASSIFICATION)-DAY. In a fairly cool story, The New York Times reports that when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st, hundreds of millions of classified government documents will instantly enter the public sphere, including 275 million from the FBI alone. Indeed, the documents, whose quarter century (or more) of secrecy has now ended, will shed enormous light on everything from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Vietnam War to the Soviet espionage network. Should be fun stuff for the historians. An interesting sidenote here is the secrecy-obsessed Bush administration didn't block or eliminate this declassification. They could've, given that it was a Clinton initiative and subject to executive review, but they're letting it go through. Good for them. --Ezra Klein
