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Hip in the Heartland
This week Claire Cain Miller of the NY Times reported on an interesting migration trend. The young, college-educated, professional-and-entrepreneurial class we expect to see concentrating in Brooklyn,...
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History's Greatest Monster
Usually I am a fan of all things American. But ... It arrived innocently enough, in the email ... This article was originally published at...
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What a Wandering Airliner Says About China's Prospects
The South China Morning Post has a fascinating story about the flight of a Chinese-owned airliner that eventually got its 200 passengers safely to the ground, but not before some misadventures. The...
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Political News from Maine: Latest Shifts in the Race for Governor
Four years ago, when Republicans were sweeping the boards in many midterm contests, the Tea Party faction had one of its biggest and strangest victories in Maine. Biggest, in that the Tea Party...
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Mark Zuckerberg Speaking Chinese: Brave, Foolish, or Both?
About ten days ago Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a video of himself giving a speech and handling a Q&A with students at Tsinghua University in Beijing — and doing it in Chinese....
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Isaac Stone Fish With More on Mark Zuckerberg's Chinese Language Show
Two weeks ago Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg posted a video of himself doing a speech and Q-and-A session in China, in Chinese. Soon thereafter, Isaac Stone Fish of Foreign Policy, whose friends had asked...
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'A Foreigner Speaking Chinese—That's Scary!'
Two days I described the disagreement on whether it was brave or crazy for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, to do a public session in Chinese, and the larger issues of language-learning the controversy...
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The Under-Appreciated Genius of Mark Zuckerberg in China
I promise, this is it. But I think I can also promise that this is worth it. Earlier today, I posted a summary of the back-and-forth about Mark Zuckerberg's decision to do a 30-minute session in...
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Vote Early and Often!
Get out and vote! I will be doing so in D.C. later today, though not, alas, for a full-fledged senator or representative, nor an anti-leafblower ordinance, but there's always next time. I'll vote once...
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How to Sign Up for Our 'American Futures' Newsletter
This post is to introduce a new email newsletter that I hope you’ll be interested in. It’s about the “American Futures” reporting project that my wife Deb and I have been undertaking through the past...
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Is the U.S.-China Climate Pact as Big a Deal as It Seems?
I've been offline for many hours and am just now seeing the announcements from Beijing. The United States and China have apparently agreed to do what anyone who has thought seriously about climate has...
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Talking With Chuck Hagel
I like and respect former Senator, soon-to-be-former Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel, and I am sorry that he is leaving this position. For day-job reasons, namely closing a long magazine story that...
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How to Land an Airplane, If You're Blind
I spent much of this afternoon flying a small airplane, with my wife Deb. The idea (after closing an article) was to get off the East Coast, toward our destinations in the west, before the latest...
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Thanksgiving in the Dust Bowl
Through the 1930s, a woman named Caroline Henderson wrote a popular series of articles for The Atlantic Monthly called "Letters from the Dust Bowl." She had grown up in Iowa, gone to college at Mount...
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On the Politics of American Resilience
It's been four weeks since the U.S. election day. Through most of that time I've been offline and underwater (or in the air), finishing one big project and beginning another. Starting this week, my...
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China Catches Up
My friend Brian Glucroft, who over the years has done memorable photography and reportage about the vivid, diverse humanity of daily life in China, sends the picture above, taken a few days ago in...
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Artisanal Salt From an Ancient Sea
Fair warning: I am not going to try to strap any Larger Policy Significance onto this report. It was just one of the more interesting things we've seen on our travel, and we wanted to let others know...
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Another Look at Salt-Harvesting in West Virginia
Last night I described our fascinating and surreal trip to a successful "artisan salt" factory outside Charleston, West Virginia. The fascinating part is I hope obvious; the surreal part is that the...
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The Past Is Never Past: Slave Labor in the West Virginia Salt Works
Last week I mentioned in two posts (here and here) the revived "artisanal salt" industry that a brother and sister, Lewis Payne and Nancy Bruns, are creating on the site of the family's very successful...
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The Tragic Airplane Crash in Gaithersburg, Maryland
Yesterday afternoon, after flying with my wife in a small propeller airplane up through the Central Valley of California (for today's Atlantic Navigate conference in San Francisco), we heard the...
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