Some journalists may remember the outrage back in 2014 about the Justice Department spying on journalists. And they may even remember Attorney General Eric Holder's promise to go straight and stop doing it — via new guidelines. But Trevor Timm, writing as a columnist in the Columbia Journalism Review, tells another chapter in the story.

A similar bill almost became law in 2014, and chances of the current bill being enacted seem good. But the possibility of a last-minute derailment, especially in an election year, remains. To complicate matters, journalism and open government groups found problems with a last-minute "carve-out" for intelligence inserted at the behest of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

In April of 1963, Charles Wurster anda small group of fellow scientists decidedthey would monitor a planned DDTspraying in Hanover, N.H. They hadn’tread Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” published the year before; norhad they looked at much of the scientific literature.“We were unbiased and empty-headed,” Wurster recalls in acompelling new memoir, “DDT Wars,” about the early days of theEnvironmental Defense Fund and the fight to ban most uses of persistentorganic pollutants such as DDT.With a Ph.D.