How Ta-Nehisi Coates built the best comment section on the internet—and why it can’t last.
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Posted inEditor's Pick
The Color of His Presidency
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 […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Girls Next Door
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 […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Rahm Emanuel: Mayor America
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 […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Sinkhole of Bureaucracy
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 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Experiences of Black Americans: A Reading List
As a white woman, my role in conversations about race is to listen and learn. This week, I wanted to include pieces about empowerment, stereotypes and intersection in the realm of race. One reading list cannot encompass the vast array of experiences of black Americans; this is not meant to be exhaustive. Send me your […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What Happens When Public Complaining Becomes a Career Aspiration
The Op-Ed Economy meanwhile means that whatever the event, we’re treated to what is essentially “commentariat tryouts.” Twitter was already the free-floating comment section ready to wrap itself around whatever the topic is. But once CNN began reading tweets aloud on-air sometime around the first election of President Obama, and op-ed columns spread across every […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Experiences of Black Americans: A Reading List
As a white woman, my role in conversations about race is to listen and learn. This week, I wanted to include pieces about empowerment, stereotypes and intersection in the realm of race. One reading list cannot encompass the vast array of experiences of black Americans; this is not meant to be exhaustive. Send me your […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Locked in the Cabinet
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 […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Lonely Guy
Todd Purdum argues that President Obama’s isolation from the rest of Washington, D.C., has made him less effective as a politician over the last five years: Obama is far from the first president—or the first suddenly world-famous figure—to keep his own counsel or to rely on the tightest possible circle of longtime advisers and old, […]
