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Where Harris Succeeded and Pence Failed
Will this latest debate make a measurable difference in the outcome of the election? Probably not; vice-presidential debates rarely do. But something significant may have happened last night, and it...
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What Happens After the Election
What else is going on in the country, with less than two weeks in this consequential election season? Here is a sampling of recent articles and developments worth notice.Prospects for local journalism:...
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Trump’s Indifference Amounts to Negligent Homicide
Negligent homicide has a specific meaning in the law books. The standards of proof and categories of offense vary from state to state. But the essence is: Someone died because someone else did not...
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How to Reconnect Rural and Urban America
As it was in 2016, so it is again in 2020: A central axis of national-election results is the rural-urban gulf. Larger cities—really, conurbations of any sort—mainly went for Joe Biden. Donald Trump’s...
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How Biden Should Investigate Trump
This article was published online on December 9, 2020.I. A Crimes Commission?As he prepares to occupy the White House, President-elect Joe Biden faces a decision rare in American history: what to do...
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What Post-pandemic Repair Could Look Like
The pandemic ravaged America’s big cities first, and now its countryside. The public-health and economic repercussions have been felt everywhere. But they have been hardest on the smallest businesses,...
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Time for Consequences
The most immediate challenge any new president faces is deciding what not to do. For Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the catastrophes of the past four days have not radically changed the way they should...
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Why Biden’s Inaugural Address Succeeded
Political speeches follow a surprisingly simple set of rules—or at least the successful ones do. Newly sworn-in President Joe Biden observed them all in his inaugural address. Although his 20 minutes...
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How Michael Jones Changed Our Daily Lives
Last week, at his home in Sunnyvale, California, a man named Michael T. Jones died of cancer, at age 60. This past weekend the local San Jose Mercury-News ran an appreciation of him and summary of his...
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Learning From the New Deal—For the Next Recovery
A few days ago, I was talking with the mayor of a medium-sized “red state” city about how his community was weathering today’s public-health and financial crises. I told him I was mainly curious about...
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When a Company Invests in an ‘Underdog City’
The country is full of “underdog cities”—communities and regions that are aware of losing out and having been overlooked. Some are in Appalachia, some in the Deep South, some around the Great Lakes,...
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Why the Our Towns Documentary Is Timely
This evening—April 13, at 9 p.m. ET—HBO will air its new documentary Our Towns. The film will be available for streaming on HBO Max, and you can see a brief trailer for it here.Naturally my wife, Deb...
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A Film ‘for the 80 Percent’
Last night HBO aired its new documentary, Our Towns, which grew out of a long Atlantic series and later a book, as I described here yesterday. It has a number of upcoming screenings on HBO and is...
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What the Bidens Understand About Community College
In the last week of April, Joe Biden gave his address to a joint session of Congress, which is of course what first-year presidents do, instead of an official “State of the Union” message. In the first...
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How FDR Changed Political Communication
The renowned filmmaker Ken Burns has a new project called UNUM, about the sources of connection rather than separation in American life.His latest segment involves “Communication” in all its aspects,...
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Dan Frank Was a Gifted and Generous Editor
I don’t know how many people in the reading public would recognize the name Dan Frank. Millions of them should. He was a gifted editor, mentor, leader, and friend, who within the publishing world was...
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What Ancient Rome Tells Us About Today’s Senate
The U.S. Senate’s abdication of duty at the start of this Memorial Day weekend, when 11 senators (nine of them Republican) did not even show up to vote on authorizing an investigation of the January 6...
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Does the U.S. Senate Resemble Ancient Rome?
Over the weekend, this space held the third installment in the “Lessons of Rome” chronicles by my friend Eric Schnurer. This one went into the comparison between the Roman Senate, in the era of Cicero...
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Our Towns: State Programs Are Laboratories for the Nation
My wife, Deb, has written about the concept of “Big Little Ideas.” These are modest-seeming, simple-and-practical steps that can have surprisingly large consequences.I am drawn to the parallel concept...
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Will 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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