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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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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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