Longreads

Mike Bloomberg has become important because he represents a great American dream, not the one about owning a home or becoming more successful than your father but the one beneath all of those, the foundational American dream — the dream of freedom from politics. Bloomberg is the ultimate independent, the calm modern technocrat rooted in metrics and cleansed of ideology, come to drain the swamps of government with his amazing modern business-management techniques ... unless he's actually just an old-fashioned autocrat looking down on us from above and tinkering with our lives like a science experiment, stripping our noisy polis of all its native poetry.

In the twelve years since he resigned in defeat and disgrace, he has been carefully plotting his return to power. As 2012 approaches, he has raised as much money as all of his potential rivals combined and sits atop the polls for the Republican presidential nomination. But just who is Newton Leroy Gingrich, really? An epic and bizarre story of American power in an unsettled age.

And the Oklahoma man — eighth-grade teacher by day, militant blogger by night — who may personify it more than any of the conservatives who, when the town halls pass, may be pointing the way to a holy war that goes way beyond health care

For thirty-six years, Warren Hern has been one of the few doctors in America to specialize in late abortions. George Tiller was another. And when Dr. Tiller was murdered that Sunday in church, Warren Hern became the only one left.

"How do you know when a Teamster is dead?" "The donut falls out of his hand." That's one of the oldest Teamster jokes — one of many I compiled years ago during the course of a lengthy investigation into union corruption and thuggery in Hollywood.