Many people know that Jews blow the shofar, or ram's horn, on the holy days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Less well-known is the custom of blowing the shofar at the end of the daily morning prayer service for the month preceding the High Holy Days to provide a warning that the days of judgment are coming. These days New York Jews sense a different kind of warning.

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Fifty years ago today, Ronald Reagan gave one of the most important speeches of his life. While speaking to the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, Reagan asked a powerful question: What would people of the future think if they opened a time capsule in 100 years? Would they believe Americans had met the challenges of the moment?

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It gets hot in Washington. Real hot. On Aug. 6, 1918, the temperature hit 106 degrees.

Washingtonians, including top government officials, have been coping with this heat since the earliest days of our Republic. In the days before air conditioning, there wasn't much to do about it other than get out of town. The congressional summer recess dates to 1791. As of 1970, it's a statutory requirement.

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The embarrassing revelations from Anthony Fauci's diary make me wonder if anyone ever gave him the warning I received when I served in George W. Bush's administration: Be careful what you write down. As Dr. Fauci is learning, anything written down while working for government can become a government record.

Diaries have been part of the landscape since the earliest days of our republic. George Washington kept one, filling it during his early morning "quiet time," when he also wrote letters and handled paperwork. From John Quincy Adams's diary we know that he regularly woke early and swam naked in the Potomac, occasionally with his sons or his valet.

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On a recent tour of the U.S. Capitol building—my first since working there nearly 30 years ago—I was reminded of just how beautiful and magisterial it is. Its construction and design, however, were hotly contested things, as I learned from Brian Jay Jones's "The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building."

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