Harry Truman was a classic American striver, and a failure, until politics intervened.
November/December 2012
Brass Backwards
Thomas Ricks explains the declining competence of America’s senior military commanders.
Memoirs of an Academic Fraudster
Inside the shadowy business of ghostwriting college students’ papers.
Spread Too Thin
Scholars have discovered that certain everyday food items have played pivotal roles in the history of civilization. Apparently, peanut butter is not one of them.
Last Call
Industry giants are threatening to swallow up America’s carefully regulated alcohol industry, and remake America in the image of booze-soaked Britain.
Obama’s Game of Chicken
The untold story of how the administration tried to stand up to big agricultural companies on behalf of independent farmers, and lost.
Drone On
It’s probably a matter of when, not if, al-Qaeda in Yemen successfully strikes the U.S. Yet the drone attacks currently keeping the organization at bay are also helping recruit more terrorists. Can you say “no-win situation”?
Act of Recovery
Only one national reporter, Michael Grunwald, bothered to take a detailed look at how well the $787 billion stimulus was spent. What he discovered confounds the Beltway conventional wisdom.
The Conservative War on Prisons
Right-wing operatives have decided that prisons are a lot like schools: hugely expensive, inefficient, and in need of root-and-branch reform. Is this how progress will happen in a hyper-polarized world?
How We Could Blow the Energy Boom
America’s vast new surplus of natural gas could lead to great prosperity and a cleaner environment. But if we don’t fix our decrepit, blackout -prone electric grid, we could wind up sitting in the dark.
George W. Bush, On the Ballot Again
One early summer day in 2000 I was summoned to the Oval Office along with several other White House staffers to get instructions from President Bill Clinton on what he wanted to say in his upcoming speech at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, a speech I was assigned to cowrite. But the president… Read more »
Woodward’s folly … Romney’s hardship … Finishing what Clinton started
President, dictator, whatever In the long parade of books on the topic of what Obama could or should have done, which began with Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men, the silliest of all has to be Bob Woodward ‘s The Price of Politics. The problem with all of these books is that their authors are beholden to… Read more »
Successes of Philanthropy
