Search

This is the introduction to Checks and Balance, a weekly, subscriber-only newsletter bringing exclusive insight from our correspondents in America. Sign up for https://www.economist.com/newsletters/checks-and-balance . James Bennet, our Lexington columnist, [...]

Time was when American politics served up electrifying or at least surprising nominees to be president: Barack Obama, barely three years out of the Illinois state legislature, storming past Hillary [...]

In his offices overlooking Lake Washington, just east of Seattle, Bill Gates grabbed a legal pad recently and began covering it in his left-handed scrawl. He scribbled arrows by each [...]

About two weeks after Bill Clinton left the White House, in 2001, I went up to Chappaqua, New York, in hopes of getting a sense of his new life, for [...]

YOU COULD LOOK AT MICHAEL BLOOMBERG--astringent, profane, irritated by small talk, impatient with the politics of empathy-and see a plutocrat whose billions have given him the freedom to say and [...]

NOT SINCE THE GILDED AGE has our politics been opened so wide to corporate contributions and donations from secret sources. And the new era of big money has just begun. [...]

This is the ninth in a series of archival excerpts in honor of the magazine's 150th anniversary. This installment is introduced by James Bennet, the editor of The Atlantic. TO [...]

At the beginning of 1992, the directors of General Motors Corporation, the world's biggest industrial company, decided to figure out what was going on in the organization they theoretically controlled. [...]

It's 4:30 in the afternoon on the windswept lawns of the president's estate at Kennebunkport, and dozens of journalists are getting tired of watching the dog romp. At last, the [...]

It's bitter political irony that liberal Democrats like Sharon Pratt Dixon are the first leaders since the election of Ronald Reagan (under whom the federal workforce grew more than seven [...]

As I read the Monthly month after month,' writes B. J. Luberoff of Summit, New Jersey, 'I'm beginning to get the same reaction I have to '60 Minutes': All I [...]

Consider Clayton Karioka, who serves up 'Hazelnut,' Amaretto,' and 'Decaf Genuine Guatemala Antigua' coffee from behind the counter at Bucks County Nut & Coffee Company in Washington's Union Station, where [...]

James Bennet is an editor of the Washington Monthly. Research assistance was provided by Elliott Beard and Deborah Yavelak Sieff. Historians will no doubt debate for decades the what ifs [...]

James Bennet is an editor of the Washington Monthly. Research assistance was provided by Elliott Beard and Sean O'Sullivan. Why they failed to stop the war Those who spent a [...]

HOW THEY MISSED THAT STORY It's hard to recall now that in the first days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, sending any American troops--much less 430,000 of them--to the Middle East [...]

The Stupidity of Free-Market Chic . . . . . . in the Middle East As compensation for the loss of a good chunk of their ideological foundation in the [...]

How the Cleaver Family Destroyed Our S&Ls After a fair amount of confusion over which vague entity ('deregulation,' 'campaign finance') deserved the blame for the $500 billion savings and loan [...]

Power Failure The outlook has only gotten rosier for Alltel, a telephone holding company headquartered in Ohio, since Forbes called it 'the industry's most dramatically improved company for 1986.' Sticking [...]

By James Bennet The Cold War is over and you're ready for bed. So you pat the dog, kiss the wife, and set the alarm for a half hour later [...]

A lieutenant commander should be in charge of a small ship or the weapons on a big one. But in today's swollen officer corps, he's just as likely to have [...]

Sentences That Make Sense It was very hard, last July, to figure out what the sentence handed Oliver North meant. A jury had convicted him of three crimes: aiding and [...]