Life is unfair, as a Democratic president once put it. That was John F. Kennedy, at a press conference early in his term.Jimmy Carter did not go through as extreme a range of the blessings and cruelties of fate as did Kennedy and his family. But I think Carter’s long years in the public eye highlighted a theme of most lives, public and private: the tension between what we plan and what happens.
Listening to Joe Biden give his first official State of the Union address on Tuesday night, I thought: This is strong. It is clear; it’s the right message in the right language. It reflects the speaker in an honest way. And it also brings something new to this tired form.But each of those judgments rests on assumptions about speeches in general and State of the Union addresses in particular. So let me lay out my reasoning and then get to the details of the speech.
This is the latest installment in a series that began back in 2019, with an article I did for the print magazine on Americans’ long-standing obsession with the decline-and-fall narrative of Rome.Many people wrote in to agree, disagree, or otherwise react. The online discussion begins here. But the most sustained line of response has been from my friend Eric Schnurer, a writer and long-time advisor to state and local governments.
This is the latest installment in a series that began back in 2019, with an article I did for the print magazine on Americans’ long-standing obsession with the decline-and-fall narrative of Rome.Many people wrote in to agree, disagree, and otherwise react. The online discussion begins here. But the most sustained line of response has been from my friend Eric Schnurer.
My wife, Deb, has written about the concept of “Big Little Ideas.” These are modest-seeming, simple-and-practical steps that can have surprisingly large consequences.I am drawn to the parallel concept of “New Old Ideas.” These are themes from the American past that have new relevance for the United States of this moment and the years to come.Every nation has its leitmotifs: its tendencies and excesses and achievements, which run through its history.
Over the weekend, this space held the third installment in the “Lessons of Rome” chronicles by my friend Eric Schnurer. This one went into the comparison between the Roman Senate, in the era of Cicero and the Catiline conspiracy, and the current one in Washington.If you haven’t read it yet, please give it a try—among other reasons, for the speechwriter’s view of classic Latin rhetoric.
The U.S. Senate’s abdication of duty at the start of this Memorial Day weekend, when 11 senators (nine of them Republican) did not even show up to vote on authorizing an investigation of the January 6 insurrection, makes the item below particularly timely.Fifty-four senators (including six Republicans) voted to approve the investigative commission. Only 35 opposed it.But in the institutionalized rule-of-the-minority that is the contemporary Senate, the measure “failed.
The U.S. Senate’s abdication of duty at the start of this Memorial Day weekend, when 11 senators (nine of them Republican) did not even show up to vote on authorizing an investigation of the January 6 insurrection, makes the item below particularly timely.Fifty-four senators (including six Republicans) voted to approve the investigative commission. Only 35 opposed it.But in the institutionalized rule-of-the-minority that is the contemporary Senate, the measure “failed.
I don’t know how many people in the reading public would recognize the name Dan Frank. Millions of them should. He was a gifted editor, mentor, leader, and friend, who within the publishing world was renowned. His untimely death of cancer yesterday, at age 67, is a terrible loss especially for his family and colleagues, but also to a vast community of writers and to the reading public.Minute by minute, and page by page, writers gripe about editors.
The renowned filmmaker Ken Burns has a new project called UNUM, about the sources of connection rather than separation in American life.His latest segment involves “Communication” in all its aspects, and it combines historical footage with current commentary. Some of the modern commenters are Yamiche Alcindor, Jane Mayer, Megan Twohey, Kara Swisher, and Will Sommer. You can see their clips here.
Last night HBO aired its new documentary, Our Towns, which grew out of a long Atlantic series and later a book, as I described here yesterday. It has a number of upcoming screenings on HBO and is available for streaming on HBO Max.
The country is full of “underdog cities”—communities and regions that are aware of losing out and having been overlooked. Some are in Appalachia, some in the Deep South, some around the Great Lakes, some in inland regions of otherwise-prospering states in the West.
A few days ago, I was talking on the phone with the mayor of a medium-sized “red state” city about how his town was weathering the public-health and financial crises of this era. I told him I was mainly curious about his observations, rather than looking at the moment for on-the-record quotes.
Last week, at his home in Sunnyvale, California, a man named Michael T. Jones died of cancer, at age 60. This past weekend the local San Jose Mercury-News ran an appreciation of him and summary of his career, which you can read here. He is mourned by the many friends he made over the decades, of course most of all by his wife, June, with whom he recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary.
Political speeches follow a surprisingly simple set of rules—or at least the successful ones do. Newly sworn-in President Joe Biden observed them all in his inaugural address. Although his 20 minutes at the lectern are not likely to be parsed and studied for rhetorical flourishes, with this speech Biden accomplished something more important: He signaled how he will approach this job and this moment in history.The first rule in political rhetoric is authenticity.
The most immediate challenge any new president faces is deciding what not to do. For Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the catastrophes of the past four days have not radically changed the way they should make those choices. One week ago, it was imperative that they mainly look forward, to the public-health, economic, and foreign-affairs emergencies that they are inheriting. That is still their duty and imperative now.
The pandemic ravaged America’s big cities first, and now its countryside. The public-health and economic repercussions have been felt everywhere. But they have been hardest on the smallest businesses, and the most vulnerable families.This is an update, following a report last month, on plans to repair the damage now being done.
What else is going on in the country, with less than two weeks in this consequential election season? Here is a sampling of recent articles and developments worth notice.Prospects for local journalism: The strength and importance of local journalism have always grown from its attention to the local: What is happening in the town or region, what is getting better or worse, how local institutions are responding.
Will this latest debate make a measurable difference in the outcome of the election? Probably not; vice-presidential debates rarely do. But something significant may have happened last night, and it involves what usually turns out to matter, if anything does, from televised debates. Namely, the parts of their personalities and identities each candidate purposefully or unintentionally conveyed.
The 90-minute spectacle tonight calls into question the value of having any “debates” of this sort ever again. No one knows more about public life than he or she did before this disaster began; some people know less; and everyone feels and looks worse.Start with the supposed moderator, Chris Wallace. It became obvious five minutes in that Donald Trump’s strategy was to interrupt, yell, insult, and disrupt as often as he could.
This evening we’ll see Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the same stage, in the first of what are scheduled to be three debates.I will confess that I did not think this event would occur—and I am still not sure about the subsequent ones.
Everyone who knew him has been shocked by the news that Ted Halstead, a founder of New America and pioneer of many other causes and organizations, has died in the past few days in a hiking accident in Spain. He had recently turned 52.Accidental deaths are by definition shocking, but intensely so in Ted’s case, because he has seemed to personify youth and promise.
This week, NBC’s Peacock Channel will begin streaming the feature-length documentary A Most Beautiful Thing. A trailer of the film is on Vimeo here, and the main site for the project is here. I saw a preview version last week and recommend it. The film’s story would be surprising and engrossing at any time, but it has a current power and relevance its producers could not have foreseen when they began making it.
In 1960, when he was still in his 30s and already a renowned novelist, Norman Mailer wrote about that year’s Democratic National Convention in an article for Esquire magazine. Mailer’s article was called “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” and it was later hailed as one of the most important forebears of the “New Journalism” movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
Here is one more item about a bellwether business category that until recently had been an indicator of downtown renewal and locally focused entrepreneurship—and which now is figuring out how and whether it can survive.I am talking about the small, independent, start-up breweries and distilleries whose numbers have increased by the thousands in the past decade—but many of whose members are now just trying to hang on.
A year ago, I published a piece in the print magazine about that long-standing object of American fascination, the Roman Empire. Usually, and usefully, Americans have over the centuries looked to Rome for guidance on how their nation could avoid the predictable slide from republic to empire to conquest and dissolution. My favorite in this genre is the wonderful 2007 book Are We Rome?, by my friend (and Atlantic colleague) Cullen Murphy.
What is the most effective thing an individual can do about climate change? There are lots of possible answers: what you eat, how you vote, where and how you live, how you travel, and so on. Every one of them matters. For Americans, at this moment, the one that matters most may be how you vote.But among the steps most immediately within many people’s control, an important one is planting trees. Yes, there interview.
Over the years, I’ve frequently mentioned my friend Michael Jones, a computer scientist and geography whiz. Nine years ago, he was a leading figure in my Atlantic story “Hacked,” the saga of what my wife Deb and I learned when her email account was taken over by international hackers. For an Atlantic column around the same time, I interviewed him on the way omnipresent, always-available mapping was likely to change people’s habits and lives.
Earlier this week I mentioned the surprisingly important role that craft brewing had played in downtown renewal across the country over the past decade. And I talked with one of the pioneers of that movement, Jim Koch of the Boston Beer Company, about how this part of America’s startup economy was likely to fare.Here are reports from two companies of a similar spirit but entirely different scale from Koch’s nationally distributed Samuel Adams brand.
A few decades ago, “American beer” had the same connotation in the world of brewing as Velveeta-style “American cheese” had for connoisseurs of Stilton or Brie. Mid-20th-century American beer culture was known for its handful of giant breweries, and for the unadventurous, bland lagers they pumped out.In those days, brewers in England or Belgium or Germany would roll their eyes at what Yanks considered “good beer.