An Unlucky President, and a Lucky Man
Life is unfair, as a Democratic president once put it. That was John F. Kennedy, at a press conference early in his term.Jimmy Carter did not go through as extreme a range of the blessings and...
View ArticleBiden’s State of the Union Did Something New
Listening to Joe Biden give his first official State of the Union address on Tuesday night, I thought: This is strong. It is clear; it’s the right message in the right language. It reflects the speaker...
View ArticleWill the U.S. Pass a Point of No Return?
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. This is the latest installment in a series that began back in 2019, with...
View ArticleOur Towns: State Programs Are Laboratories for the Nation
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. My wife, Deb, has written about the concept of “Big Little Ideas.” These...
View ArticleDoes the U.S. Senate Resemble Ancient Rome?
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. Over the weekend, this space held the third installment in the “Lessons...
View ArticleWhat Ancient Rome Tells Us About Today’s Senate
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. The U.S. Senate’s abdication of duty at the start of this Memorial Day...
View ArticleDan Frank Was a Gifted and Generous Editor
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. I don’t know how many people in the reading public would recognize the...
View ArticleHow FDR Changed Political Communication
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. The renowned filmmaker Ken Burns has a new project called UNUM, about the...
View ArticleWhat the Bidens Understand About Community College
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. In the last week of April, Joe Biden gave his address to a joint session...
View ArticleA Film ‘for the 80 Percent’
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. Last night HBO aired its new documentary, Our Towns, which grew out of a...
View ArticleWhy the Our Towns Documentary Is Timely
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. This evening—April 13, at 9 p.m. ET—HBO will air its new documentary Our...
View ArticleWhen a Company Invests in an ‘Underdog City’
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. The country is full of “underdog cities”—communities and regions that are...
View ArticleLearning From the New Deal—For the Next Recovery
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. A few days ago, I was talking with the mayor of a medium-sized “red...
View ArticleHow Michael Jones Changed Our Daily Lives
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. Last week, at his home in Sunnyvale, California, a man named Michael T....
View ArticleWhat Post-pandemic Repair Could Look Like
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. The pandemic ravaged America’s big cities first, and now its countryside....
View ArticleHow to Reconnect Rural and Urban America
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. As it was in 2016, so it is again in 2020: A central axis of...
View ArticleWhat Happens After the Election
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. What else is going on in the country, with less than two weeks in this...
View ArticleWhat Matters in Tonight’s Debate
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. This evening we’ll see Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the same stage, in...
View ArticleA ‘Climate Corps’ of California Volunteers
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. Back in the early days of the pandemic, when some people imagined that...
View ArticleWill the U.S. Pass a Point of No Return?
This is the latest installment in a series that began back in 2019, with an article I did for the print magazine on Americans’ long-standing obsession with the decline-and-fall narrative of Rome.Many...
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