Magazine

Jim worked in a Defense Department office with an employee whose lack of productivity was matched only by his hostile attitude. Eventually, a good manager with the patience of Job, a mastery of detail to match, and the help of higher management took the time to record, day by day, the offender’s record of non-work. […]

The software soon arrived in the mail. But it didn’t work. And the dealer that had sold it no longer existed. No Web page, no address, no recourse for Ms. Fischer and certainly no money back. She called the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) but no one knew where the company had gone, where it had […]

As the Nazi doctors knew well, there’s a seductive inverse relationship in human experiments: the less you protect the particular humans you study, the more you can learn about humans in general. Systematic near-freezing of Jews in concentration camps taught the German Luftwaffe a lot about staving off hypothermia, which was crucial for their pilots […]

When Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans forced a temporary government shutdown in late 1995, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner scored points for the president by warning that “the environmental cop is not on the beat.” Her warning worked. The image of government standing idly by while corporate polluters fouled the air and water […]

On September 18, The New York Times ran a breathless front-page account of corporate propaganda. The Microsoft Corporation, we learned, had bankrolled a California think tank—ironically named the Independent Institute—to run full-page newspaper ads supporting Microsoft’s claim of innocence in the face of federal antitrust charges. The ads took the form of a letter signed […]

If there is a prize for the political scam of the 20th century, it should go to the conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960s were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers’ money. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, from 1963 when […]

Harry McPherson has a copy of The Nation lying on his expansive desk in his corner office at Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand in downtown Washington. The magazine subscription is a gift from his daughter, an amulet meant to ward off the evils lurking in her dad’s chosen profession. The subscription, McPherson says, smiling, […]

Overshadowing that insight is a curious irony: On Self Respect first appeared in the pages of Vogue. While Didion’s essay explained that a sense of self-worth had nothing to do with the perceptions of others, the magazine insinuated that external image was everything. For the young women who picked up that 1961 edition of the […]

There seems to be an unwritten rule in newsrooms today: A mention of Al Gore is incomplete without a reference to his wooden presence. “[M]ost of the press about Gore on the stump could run under the headline ‘Stiff man still stiff,’” Melinda Henneberger observed in The New York Times. Gail Collins remarked on Gore’s […]