The Citizen's Constitution: An Annotated Guide »

Seth Lipsky, founding editor of the New York Sun, has also worked at the Wall Street Journal at home and abroad, and was founding editor of the Forward newspaper, where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1991. He lives with his wife and four children in New York.

An Elements of Style for how our government is supposed to work

The New York Times - Adam Liptak

Mississippi did not ratify the 13th Amendment, the one that abolished slavery, until 1995. I learned that fact, which calls to mind the adage "better never than late," from Seth Lipsky's entertaining annotation of the Constitution. The Citizen's Constitution is a magpie's miscellany of curiosities. It is governed by a newspaperman's sensibility, one more interested in conflict and color than order and synthesis. Lipsky…is particularly good on the Constitution's first two articles, which concern Congress and the presidency. He likes rascals and absurdities.