The little boy’s father has a good heart, but he drinks. Goes on weeklong benders. It’s the early 1920s, a bad time to be a drunk: Prohibition has arrived and the Depression isn’t far behind. The boy recalls childhood fears of an absent father followed by “loud voices in the night.” At age 11, he […]
Gregg Easterbrook
Gregg Easterbrook has published three novels with a fouth coming next year and nine nonfiction books, most recently, It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 1979 to 1981.
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Who Will Catch the Falling Star?
In the aftermath of the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life, people rediscovered the back of their newspapers. The front pages were crammed with diagrams of brains and photos of Jodie Foster’s midriff and instructions on how to buy handguns. You had to flip way to the back if you wanted to read about anything besides […]
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Washington’s Real Estate Secrets
It’s easy to get lost in Washington, and the easiest place is around the Mall, where partial rotaries and unmarked ramps give driving a distinct Alice-in-Wonderland quality. Many of the unmarked ramps lead to the Virginia bridges, and even native Washingtonians fear these roads. The attrition rate for tourists is especially high. Like medieval sailors […]
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How Big Labor Brings Home the Bacon
On Symphony Road in Boston’s Fenway district, a contractor is gutting an old building to make apartments for the poor. The renovation is costing $23,000 per unit, and the finished apartments will rent to eligible families for $225 to $375 per month. About a block away, another contractor is fixing up a similar building for […]
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How to End It: Natural Gas
Where do you always find something? In the last place you look. Till you look in that last place, it’s “lost.” Natural gas has been “lost” for years. The best of all possible fuels, clean and cheap, natural gas was supposed to be as lost as the Seven Cities of Gold. No amount of looking […]
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New Hope for the Hard-Core Rich
It somehow seems unjust that those who acquire great wealth can also lose it. Or at least it seems unjust to the wealthy, who come to the government demanding bailouts.
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The Most Powerful Nobody in Washington
In Washington, where influence is usually measured in newspaper column inches, few power-seekers shun publicity. William Jordan is something of an anachronism, an echo from a time when Capitol Hill staff members quietly accumulated power while hiding beneath camouflage nets of perfect opacity.
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The Art of Further Study
Just as clerics schooled in mystic orders surround the Pope, consultants abound in their own Vatican City—Washington D.C. They scurry about at all levels of government, jabbering in arcane dialects, mumbling half-heard benedictions. Their hollow language is fast becoming the city’s only means of communication. Hodding Carter, for example, has mastered it entirely. Can’t anybody give a straight—much less infallible—answer anymore?
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Stuck on Baltic Place: Why the Government Loses at Monopoly
It’s easy to imagine what went on back in 1972, when the boardrooms of DuPont Chemical were abuzz with conspiracy. Modern-day robber-barons reclined in chairs of fine Corinthian leather while their operatives described a breakthrough in making titanium dioxide, a pigment for paints and paper. DuPont, it seemed, had learned to make the stuff far […]
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‘Deep Tunnel’: How Our Money Flows Into Chicago’s Sewers
How Our Money Flows Into Chicago’s Sewers
