Magazine

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 […]

It’s hard to find the right running mate. And it’s especially hard for a Democrat right now: George W. Bush has a Palm Pilot filled with intriguing candidates—from Colin Powell to congressional standouts like Chuck Hagel and big state governors like Tom Ridge. By contrast, the Democrats’ little black book looks awfully thin. Some of […]

Beltway pundits meanwhile sneer about the Beltway pundits, as if they weren’t just such pundits themselves. The major players here accuse one another of being that which they themselves are; and this Dostoevskyian undertone reached its peak, or nadir, in the Clinton impeachment farce, when one after another of the President’s accusers turned out to […]

You might think that under the circumstances, the government would be pouring enormous resources into evaluating the hows and whys of prescription drug fatalities, but it is not. Industry-supported reforms have provided the FDA major resources to focus on the approval of new drugs, but once these drugs are out in the market, the picture […]

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 […]

History will record that the plane did indeed fly into the mountain: after a stormy two-year tenure in Atlanta, when the paper won two Pulitzers but Kovach ran afoul of his profit-minded corporate bosses, he left Atlanta to become curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. This summer he’s returning to Washington to write books […]

Certainly, a few reporters do use the Freedom of Information Act—sometimes with spectacular results. Reporter Russell Carollo of the Dayton Daily News filed more than 100 FOIA requests for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning series on military medicine he co-authored with Jeff Nesmith. But most reporters never use the law at all. Many FOIA-centered stories in […]

Rather quietly in what is usually a publicity-oriented industry, the king of aerospace firms has begun selling the Boeing Business Jet (BBJ), a 737-700 jetliner, which normally seats about 125 passengers, modified into a corporate aircraft for the use of a few executives or even just one person. Boeing delivered the first fully completed (that […]

“We’re going to talk about eyes today; we all have two,” she says—no, decrees—to 22 students watching her from behind laboratory benches. “Why?” A small pause, short enough to escape conscious notice but long enough to underline the question’s significance. And when Matthews launches into her introduction, she paces and gestures, delivering lab instructions in […]