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2020 Time Capsule #17: ‘Empathy and Simple Kindness’
As the past week began, the Unites States was crossing 50,000 reported deaths from the coronavirus pandemic. As the new week arrives, the U.S. death total is 70,000.Of the countless extraordinary...
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Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad, for a Very Long Time
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “Uncharted,” a series about the world we’re leaving behind, and the one being remade by the pandemic.I last tooka“normal” commercial-airline flight back in...
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2020 Time Capsule #18: Time Is Speeding Up
Nearly every day of the past two weeks has brought a development that, by itself, would have been a major substantive and political event in other times. As a benchmark and reminder, a reckless move by...
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Is This the Worst Year in Modern American History?
The most traumatic year in modern American history was 1968. But what is now the second-most traumatic year, 2020, still has seven months to run. The comparison provides little comfort, and several...
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The 3 Weeks That Changed Everything
Coping with a pandemic is one of the most complex challenges a society can face. To minimize death and damage, leaders and citizens must orchestrate a huge array of different resources and tools....
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Three Guides to the Next America
This note is to kick off a resumed set of chronicles in the “Our Towns” series, after time away for a long Atlantic project on the origins of this era’s public-health and economic disaster.The results...
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Will Craft Brewing Survive?
A few decades ago, “American beer” had the same connotation in the world of brewing as Velveeta-style “American cheese” had for connoisseurs of Stilton or Brie. Mid-20th-century American beer culture...
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What Happens to Small Companies Now?
Earlier this week I mentioned the surprisingly important role that craft brewing had played in downtown renewal across the country over the past decade. And I talked with one of the pioneers of that...
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Michael Jones Receives Royal Honors
Over the years, I’ve frequently mentioned my friend Michael Jones, a computer scientist and geography whiz. Nine years ago, he was a leading figure in my Atlantic story “Hacked,” the saga of what my...
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A Plan to Grow 90,000 Trees in Los Angeles
What is the most effective thing an individual can do about climate change? There are lots of possible answers: what you eat, how you vote, where and how you live, how you travel, and so on. Every one...
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Another Lesson from the Roman Empire
A year ago, I published a piece in the print magazine about that long-standing object of American fascination, the Roman Empire. Usually, and usefully, Americans have over the centuries looked to Rome...
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How a Small Brewery Can Survive COVID-19
Here is one more item about a bellwether business category that until recently had been an indicator of downtown renewal and locally focused entrepreneurship—and which now is figuring out how and...
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The Cool-Media Approach to Conventions
In 1960, when he was still in his 30s and already a renowned novelist, Norman Mailer wrote about that year’s Democratic National Convention in an article for Esquire magazine. Mailer’s article was...
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‘A Most Beautiful Thing’ in a Time of Racial Reckoning
This week, NBCUniversal’s new Peacock streaming service will begin showing the feature-length documentary A Most Beautiful Thing. A trailer of the film is on Vimeo here, and the main site for the...
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The Sport That’s Like Playing in a Jazz Quartet
The new NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock is now offering the documentary A Most Beautiful Thing as a free feature. (Details here.) Last week I wrote about the movie, and its surprising timeliness...
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A Note on Ted Halstead
Everyone who knew him has been shocked by the news that Ted Halstead, a founder of New America and pioneer of many other causes and organizations, has died in the past few days in a hiking accident in...
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The Media Learned Nothing From 2016
We’re seeing a huge error, and a potential tragedy, unfold in real time.That’s a sentence that could apply to countless aspects of economic, medical, governmental, and environmental life at the moment....
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A ‘Climate Corps’ of California Volunteers
Back in the early days of the pandemic, when some people imagined that changes in American life might be a matter of months rather than of years, I wrote aboutCalifornia Volunteers and its response to...
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What Matters in Tonight’s Debate
This evening we’ll see Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the same stage, in the first of what are scheduled to be three debates.I will confess that I did not think this event would occur—and I am still not...
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A Disgusting Night for Democracy
The 90-minute spectacle tonight calls into question the value of having any “debates” of this sort ever again. No one knows more about public life than he or she did before this disaster began; some...
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