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On race and Obama’s presidency: This has been Obama’s M.O.: focus on “the more important things.” He’s had to deal explicitly with race in a few excruciating instances, like the 2009 “beer summit” with the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a friend of Obama’s, and James Crowley, the police sergeant responsible for Gates’s controversial […]

In 2012, President Barack Obama said the fight against human trafficking was “one of the great human rights causes of our time.” So why are so many Colorado children still being exploited? Lipstick kisses stain the corners of the mirror. Open tubes of mascara, a rainbow of eye shadows, and a warm curling iron cover […]

Has the mayor of Chicago reinvented the city’s notorious political machine—and does he covet the White House? When Rahm Emanuel became mayor of Chicago in 2011, he proclaimed: “I will not be a patient mayor.” It was an understatement. The former chief of staff to Barack Obama returned home with a near-legendary reputation for his […]

In an old Pennsylvania limestone mine in the town of Boyers, 600 federal employees are still processing paperwork by hand. A look at why the Office of Personnel Management has failed to digitize: During the past 30 years, administrations have spent more than $100 million trying to automate the old-fashioned process in the mine and […]

Inside the lonely life of an Obama Cabinet member: “We are completely marginalized … until the shit hits the fan,” says one former Cabinet deputy secretary, summing up the view of many officials I interviewed. “If your question is: Did the president rely a lot on his Cabinet as a group of advisers? No, he […]