Ben Williams is the online editorial director at New York Magazine. ••• 1. Celebrity profiles are the hardest genre to make fresh. So props to GQ for doing it not once but three times, with Jessica Pressler on Channing Tatum, Edith Zimmerman on Chris Evans, and Will Leitch on Michael Vick. With Pressler and Zimmerman, […]
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How the U.S. lost out on iPhone manufacturing work, and what it means for the future of job creation in the United States: But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States? Not long ago, Apple […]
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A look at hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, and what they reveal about the president’s decision-making process: One Cabinet official made it clear that she did not share the President’s growing commitment to coupon-clipping: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She rejected the White House’s budget for her department, and wrote the President […]
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U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s path from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to Washington—where he and the Obama administration have been forced to retreat on many of their alternative energy plans: On a cold morning in mid-November, Chu was hauled into a committee room on Capitol Hill. The hearing was the spectacle of the week, […]
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An analysis of the presidency, in historical context: I spoke with current and past members of this administration, officials from previous administrations, current and past members of the Senate and the House, and some academics. Compared with the last two times a Democrat was in the White House—during Jimmy Carter’s administration in the late 1970s […]
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Jeremy Lin’s sudden stardom has also put the spotlight on how Asian Americans are viewed in the U.S.: Not since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has there been so much national discussion about the appropriateness of discussing race. The 2008 election set the groundwork for an aggressive sort of colorblindness — as long as you voted […]
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A 2010 profile on the big media dreams of Andrew Breitbart, who died early Thursday morning at age 43: Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a […]
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The presidential bully pulpit isn’t as effective as one would think. Evidence shows that the louder a president speaks to support an issue or bill, the more committed the opposing party will be to ensure that it won’t pass: To test her theory, she created a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and […]
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Paul Clement, a former solicitor general under George W. Bush, is representing state attorneys general in the Supreme Court fight against Obama’s health care law—and it’s just one of seven cases he’ll be arguing before the court: There are two ways to assess a Supreme Court argument. One is to view it as an act […]
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A blow-by-blow account of a political negotiation gone wrong. President Obama and Republican House speaker John Boehner came close to a deal last July that would cut federal spending and bring in billions in new revenue. But a series of missteps led to its demise: From Boehner’s perspective, it’s not hard to see why he […]
