Jonathan Alter

I had dinner this week in Beijing with an elegant 85-year-old woman named He Liliang, who had one of the great front-row seats to history. Her late husband, Huang Hua, translated for the journalist Edgar Snow when he conducted his famous interviews with Mao Zedong in 1936. Her father was Mao’s teacher, and instructed him […]

I’m on a trip to China this month, and it’s coinciding with some Middle Kingdom soul-searching about what Chinese people owe one another. In an age of “golden collar” workers made rich in the new economy, the Chinese are struggling to locate their social conscience. To move to the next level of development, the government […]

The age-old tension between federal authority and states’ rights is back in a big way in this year’s presidential campaign, with Republican candidates taking the let-the-states-handle-it position on everything from environmental regulation to health-care reform. Now President Barack Obama’s education policy, a rare bipartisan winner, may also be headed back to the states, which were […]

When does “no” not really mean no? When politicians say it. Reporters understand that if the circumstances are right, the answer can always change. On Thursday, NBC News’s Savannah Guthrie asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the rumor du jour, that President Barack Obama might ask Clinton to swap jobs with Vice President Joe […]

In Florida this week, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was asked about the growing Occupy Wall Street movement. “I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare,” he said. Romney’s right. It may be dangerous — to his chances of being elected. Occupy Wall Street, now almost three weeks old, isn’t like the anti-globalization demonstrations that disrupted […]

The political world is so toxic that I needed some relief, so I tuned into a reality show more real than anything on television. I wasn’t disappointed. The stories I heard were at once harrowing and inspirational. And they were deeply connected to the future of the country. This week, I served as one of […]

Have you ever seen “The Apotheosis of George Washington”? It’s a fresco painted on the ceiling of the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, at the very center of the American republic. It was painted by Constantino Brumidi in 1865, when the Capitol was being completed at the end of the Civil War. I was reminded […]

When I worked at a newsmagazine and the editors needed a headline for the cover after some major event, we often hauled out a hardy perennial: “Now for the Hard Part.” President Barack Obama, almost marginalized in Washington this summer by a crafty opposition, is back in the game with a vigorous, sensible and, above […]

Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president? I’m not talking here about him as a tactician and communicator. We can agree that he has played some bad poker with Congress. And let’s stipulate that at the moment he’s falling short in the intangibles of leadership. I’m thinking instead of that […]