Milking the Poor: One Family’s Fall Into Homelessness
The California Experiment
Busted budgets, failing schools, overcrowded prisons, gridlocked government—California no longer beckons as America’s promised land. Except, that is, in one area: creating a new energy economy. But is its path one the rest of the nation can follow?
The Story Behind the Story
With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward to provide the “reporting” that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition. A case-study of our post-journalistic age.
Dear President Bush,
Americans want, and need, to move on from the debate over torture in Iraq and Afghanistan and close this tragic chapter in our nation’s history. An open letter to President George W. Bush
Life In (and After) Our Great Recession
Dashed hopes, less sex, even more Sisyphean labor for women—what the histories of the Depression era tell us about middle-class families in crisis, both then and now
Overdose
The health-care crisis no candidate is addressing? Too many doctors
Waiting for the Weekend
A whole two days off from work, in which we can do what we please, has only recently become a near-universal right. A history of leisure
The Final Days of Merrill Lynch
Last September, as Wall Street turned to rubble and panic threatened to come unleashed, Ken Lewis, the CEO of Bank of America, agreed to swallow one of the country’s most toxic investment houses.
Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger
With Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino has managed to create something entirely new: a story of emotionally uncomplicated, physically threatening, non-morally-anguished Jews dealing out spaghetti-western justice to Nazis.
Two Ways of Looking at a War Zone
Is Fallujah a showroom model of American success in Iraq? Only in a limited sense