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Why Obama Should Say Very Little About Hong Kong, and Other Protest Readings
Following this item last night, three more useful things to read about the drama unfolding in Hong Kong. 1) "Why Obama should keep quiet about the Hong Kong protests," by Benjamin Carlson in Global...
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Urban Comeback Stories in 2 Swing States
During this past week, while I have been head-down on a long magazine story, John Tierney has done two very interesting posts in our American Futures series about similar-but-different revitalization...
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Re-knitting the Frayed Social Fabric: What Libraries Can Do
The more we travel to different parts of the country in our American Futures project, the more we're impressed both by local idiosyncrasies and by broad emerging patterns we hadn't fully anticipated....
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How the Boy Scouts are Adapting to Modern American Life
Yesterday I mentioned one of the ongoing and heartening aspects of our American Futures visits: the ways towns small and large are re-knitting the informal social fabric whose presence creates...
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Vic Braden
Through the 1970s and 1980s, when American tennis was strong and players like Chris Evert, Jimmy Connors, and John McEnroe were the American face of the sport on court, Vic Braden was (with Bud...
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The Search for the Killer of Tom Wales Goes On
Tom WalesOn the evening of October 11, 2001, thirteen years ago today, a federal prosecutor named Tom Wales was shot and killed while he sat at a desk in the basement-office of his home in Seattle....
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Ingredients of a Better City: How Arts Play Their Part
Last week John Tierney reported on the ambitious effort that the generally thriving city of Columbus, Ohio, is undertaking to remake its long-depressed Franklinton neighborhood. That's one of Jessica...
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All Aboard for the California High-Speed Rail Chronicles!
After a few weeks' pause for reflection — and for article-writing, and for involvement with news from Scotland, Hong Kong, the Middle East, Pennsylvania, and Ohio — it's time once more to dig into on...
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2 Good Books About Politics
Here are two recent books that make important points about politics, history, culture, and human nature via fast-moving vivid narratives. Your future Senate Majority Leader? (Wikipedia)1) The Cynic, by...
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The Steve Jobs of Beer
In TV commercials for Sam Adams beer, Jim Koch is always smiling or laughing. While Koch (pronounced “Cook”) was walking me around the Sam Adams headquarters, on the site of a restored 19th-century...
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What the Beer Industry and the Computer Industry Have in Common
The photo above does not include any products of America's largest and best known craft brewery, the Boston Beer Company that produces Sam Adams. But it's a useful reference for several...
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The Glamorous Life of a Journalist, No. 1,832
Herewith an item from the email inbox. The sender is someone I don't know, and the country he is discussing is one I have never been to or written about. Most reporters get lots of PR pitches each day....
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National Problems, Local Solutions: More Reports from Ohio
We're on the road again, right now in the not-exactly-small city of Pittsburgh. Here we're asking about some of its celebrated successes in downtown revitalization, technology-hub development, and...
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California High-Speed Rail Lucky No. 13: Let's Look at Maglev and Other...
Three more installments to go! This is No. 13 in a series, started back in July, on the biggest infrastructure project underway in America, and either the most important one (if you're a supporter) or...
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In Which I Am Recruited to Switch Political Teams
I recognize that the social-intellectual ecology of blogging is different from what it was even three or four years ago. Back then—ah, the lost Golden Age of the Blog!—it was easy to assume, or...
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Books by Friends
I give the "by friends" disclosure just for the record. I mention these books because, whether or not I'd known their authors, I would think they deserved attention. And I'll mention each as tersely as...
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'Of No Party or Clique' at The Atlantic
"Of no party or clique" was the founding motto of our magazine, 157 years ago next month. In practice this mainly means that we should aspire to present each article or argument on its merits, and not...
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Rebecca Frankel and War Dogs at Sixth and I Tonight
Rebecca Frankel is an editor at Foreign Policy, a friend of our family, and the author of a great new book called War Dogs. Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post, a man who does not lightly...
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Why You Shouldn't Get Your Hopes Up for the Self-Driving Car (California...
Over the weekend, in No. 13 from the Ulysses-scale saga* of California's plan to build a north-south High-Speed Rail (HSR) system, a reader from the Silicon Valley tech industry said that his state...
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Today's Mid-Air Collision Outside Washington
There was a tragic mid-air collision this afternoon near Frederick airport, KFDK in aviation talk, about 40 miles north of Washington DC. A helicopter, initially reported as a four-seat Robinson R44,...
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