War Torn…. The New Republic’s Mike Crowley, who’s one of the most dogged and interesting reporters in Washington, has what must be a grit-your-teeth kind of gig. Being any kind of liberal reporter in DC over the last few years has been depressing enough, but Crowley’s got it worse than most of us: He’s got […]
Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Benjamin Wallace-Wells is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Posted inFrom The Archives
Getting Ahead in the GOP
Rep. Patrick McHenry and
the art of defending the
indefensible.
Posted inPolitical Animal, Politics
The case against the case against historically black colleges
The case against the case against historically black colleges?.There?s been a bit of discussion in the blogosphere recently about the very low graduation rates at historically black colleges, prompted by a New York Times story (?Little Noticed Crisis at Black Colleges?) printed on August 3. The Times? reporter, Samuel G. Freedman, worried that these schools […]
Posted inPolitical Animal, Politics
How to get ahead
How to get ahead….There’s an interesting story that’s generating a little bit of discussion in Washington but doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent elsewhere. Here’s the nub of it: Freshman Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) made phone calls to at least two North Carolina College Republicans asking them to change their votes in […]
Posted inMagazine
Polar Fleeced
The people of Tatitlik have had a spectacularly unlucky history. In 1964, much of the population was relocated from the nearby village of Chenaga, which had been destroyed by the Great Alaska Earthquake. (Chenaga sat on what turned out to be the epicenter of the 9.2 Richter quake, the most powerful recorded tremor in North […]
Posted inMagazine
Alaska, GOP Welfare State
The people of Tatitlik have had a spectacularly unlucky history. In 1964, much of the population was relocated from the nearby village of Chenaga, which had been destroyed by the Great Alaska Earthquake. (Chenaga sat on what turned out to be the epicenter of the 9.2 Richter quake, the most powerful recorded tremor in North […]
Posted inMagazine
Reverse Engineering
“In 1929, after years of preparation, Ford opened to the public a large tourist park and museum built on 252 acres in Dearborn,” writes Steven Watts in his admirable new biography. “Visitors could inspect a display of Americana–antiques of every imaginable variety–painstakingly collected by Ford’s agents. In the enclosed buildings of the Henry Ford Museum, […]
Posted inMagazine
Off Track
But there was something else I noticed: Whereas a decade ago the most creative, groundbreaking stuff came from Silicon Valley, now it all seemed to come from overseas. The plasma televisions were from Korea; the computer-like cell phones were from Finland; the feature-packed digital cameras were from Japan. During the last six months, we have […]
Posted inMagazine
Battered Women
For 50 bucks, you can buy yourself an armchair seat on a balcony ringing the room, from which you can peer down over the room. These, however, are always filled with older Italian men, the Unindicted Co-conspirator set, fat and inert in their little chairs, each one looking like a marshmallow stuffed into a shot […]
Posted inPolitical Animal, Politics
Stop Me Before I Quit Again!
STOP ME BEFORE I QUIT AGAIN!….My nominee for the best line in this morning’s New York Times comes midway through a profile of Bernard Kerik: When Mr. Kerik was appointed to a top job in the New York City Department of Correction in the mid-1990’s, one official told the department’s commissioner: ‘Congratulations. You’ve just hired […]
