G.M., Detroit and the Fall of the Black Middle Class

When we talk about what the end of the U.S. auto industry will mean to thousands of autoworkers, we tend to have a specific image of that worker in mind: He’s a conservative white Democrat who lives in suburban Detroit, hangs out in his local union hall, belongs to a bowling league and owns a hunting cabin in the Upper Peninsula. This is the iconic American autoworker. In fact, as much as a fifth of the industry’s work force is African-American.

Published: Jun 24, 2009
Length: 32 minutes (8,051 words)

How Good (or Not Evil) Is Google?

Years after cracking the very code of the Web to lucrative ends, Google may be in the midst of trying to conjure the most complicated algorithm yet: to wit, can goodness, or at least a stated intention not to be evil, scale along with the enterprise?

Author: David Carr
Published: Jun 21, 2009
Length: 4 minutes (1,197 words)

Jodi Picoult and the Anxious Parent

In the novels of Jodi Picoult, terrible things happen to children of middle-class parentage: they become terminally ill, or are maimed, gunned down, killed in accidents, molested, abducted, bullied, traumatized, stirred to violence. The assault on any individual family is typically mounted from angles multiple and unforeseen.

Published: Jun 17, 2009
Length: 11 minutes (2,893 words)

Ripped. (Or Torn Up?)

“Every tennis lover would like, someday, to play like (Roger) Federer,” Philippe Bouin told me. “But every man wants to be Rafael Nadal. Which is different.”

Published: Jun 17, 2009
Length: 33 minutes (8,294 words)

Getting Up to Speed

This is a story not about Amtrak but about trains, and the problem with any story about trains in America is that you often find yourself thinking about Amtrak, and you often find yourself thinking about how nice it would be if you weren’t thinking about Amtrak. This is especially true when you’re actually riding on Amtrak, which happened to be the case one morning in March when I boarded the Pacific Surfliner in downtown Los Angeles for a 500-mile trip, mostly up the coast, to Sacramento.

Published: Jun 10, 2009
Length: 26 minutes (6,546 words)

Data Center Overload

Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network. The stack of letters becomes the e-mail database on the computer, which gives way to Hotmail or Gmail. The clipping sent to a friend becomes the attached PDF file, which becomes a set of shared bookmarks, hosted offsite.

Published: Jun 8, 2009
Length: 16 minutes (4,192 words)

The Economy Is Still at the Brink

We are sympathetic to the extraordinary challenge President Obama faces, but if we’ve learned anything at all two years into the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes, it is that a capital-markets system this dependent on public confidence is a shockingly inadequate foundation upon which to rest our economy.

Published: Jun 7, 2009
Length: 11 minutes (2,828 words)

A Deception, and a Reluctance to Ask Questions

Last month, after actual veterans uncovered his deceptions, Richard Strandlof was detained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and then arrested by the Denver police on an outstanding warrant for driving with a suspended license. The veterans group he helped create, the Colorado Veterans Alliance, has disbanded. And now Mr. Strandlof, apparently penniless, remains in jail on $1,000 bail.

Published: Jun 7, 2009
Length: 5 minutes (1,398 words)

Taking the Hill

Sometime in the next few weeks, Congress and the White House will descend into the labyrinthine politics of comprehensive health care reform. For Barack Obama, this signals the end, in a sense, of the eventful prologue to his presidency.

Author: Matt Bai
Published: Jun 2, 2009
Length: 32 minutes (8,208 words)

The Mellowing of William Jefferson Clinton

Bill Clinton loves to shop. On a March day in an elegant crafts store in Lima, the Peruvian capital, he hunted for presents for his wife and the women on his staff back home. He had given a speech at a university earlier and just came from a ceremony kicking off a program to help impoverished Peruvians. Now he was eyeing a necklace with a green stone amulet.

Published: May 26, 2009
Length: 32 minutes (8,114 words)