Nicholas Thompson

Rosetta Meeks lives in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, but she didn’t get to vote in the presidential election. Nobody scrutinized her ballot for hanging chads or screamed himself hoarse trying to prevent officials from counting it. An African-American woman who has devoted her last six years to teaching computer skills to low-income people, Meeks wanted to […]

Unfortunately, as Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas argue in their fascinating and extremely useful new book, Open Networks, Closed Regimes, that shouldn’t surprise. The Internet hasn’t really helped global democracy, and it hasn’t built a global civil society either. In some countries, authoritarian governments have even been able to use the Internet to entrench […]

Six years later, when Serbian forces cut loose in Kosovo, Clinton threw Powell’s doctrine out the window. Obviously unclear about his goals, the president alienated Republican and Democratic traditionalists alike. The United States certainly didn’t use decisive force, nor did we pursue a clear objective: Were we trying to force Milosevic from power, or just […]

But if you call NASA to ask Ridge about his wonderful government job, you’ll have some trouble finding him. Turns out he left town not long after posing for the brochure. Now he develops supercomputing technology called Beowulf clusters for Scyld, a startup company in Maryland. He didn’t leave because he wanted more money—he’s earning […]

That time was August 1993, when, in the midst of economic malaise created by the phenomenal budget deficits of the Reagan/Bush years (economist Paul Krugman called it “The Age of Diminished Expectations”) Bill Clinton and Al Gore twisted arms and cajoled Democratic allies to pass their Budget Act through Congress and the Senate. The Act […]

We make most everything by tearing stuff apart. To make paper, we plant trees, chop them down, and send the wood through our mills. To make spoons, we yank iron up out of the earth, drop it into blast furnaces to make steel, and then mold and shape it at extreme temperatures. But what if […]

We spent the rest of the night talking and playing music together next to a pile of beer bottles and a pool table. He looked about 21 years old and wore black. He said he had grown up in Canada, someplace near Toronto that I’d never heard of. He had sex with lots of people, […]

To his opponents, Bill Clinton is Don Liddle. The economy is booming on his watch, but only because of the work of others. Larry Lindsay, George Bush’s chief economic adviser, suggests that Ronald Reagan is the real Willie Mays. Conservative pundit Robert Novak thanks entrepreneurs and says that giving credit for the boom to Clinton […]

From the chief of staff to the most obscure policy advisor, White House staffers show up with bubbling idealism, great expectations, and seemingly unlimited vigor. Then, usually within 18 months, they’re out. Although a few stick around until a new president has been elected and the moving vans roll up, most others call it quits […]