The Atlantic | July/August 2016 IT’S 2020, four years from now. The campaign is under way to succeed the president, who is retiring after a single wretched term. Voters are angrier than ever—at politicians, at compromisers, at the establishment. Congress and the White House seem incapable of working together on anything, even when their interests align. With…

The Atlantic | November 2015 THE presidency, it’s often said, is a job for which everyone arrives unprepared. But just how unprepared is unprepared enough? Political handicappers weigh presidential candidates’ partisanship, ideology, money, endorsements, consultants, and, of course, experience. Yet they too rarely consider an element of growing importance to voters: freshness. Increasingly, American voters view…

The Atlantic | March 2015 IT often befalls presidents to be most criticized in office for what later turn out to have been their particular strengths. Disparaged at the time as simplemindedness, timidity, and slickness, Ronald Reagan’s firmness, George H. W. Bush’s caution, and Bill Clinton’s adaptability look in hindsight like features, not bugs. (Unfortunately, George W.…

The Atlantic | December 2014 THIS summer, a friend called in a state of unhappy perplexity. At age 47, after years of struggling to find security in academia, he had received tenure. Instead of feeling satisfied, however, he felt trapped. He fantasized about escape. His reaction had taken him by surprise. It made no sense. Was…

The Atlantic | December 2014 IT IS 1976. Brad Stuart is in his third year of medical school at Stanford, doing his first clinical rotation. He is told to look at an elderly man with advanced lymphoma. The patient is feeble and near death, his bone marrow eviscerated by cancer. The supervising oncologist has ordered a…

National Affairs | Fall 2013 A FUNNY thing happened on the way to legislative gridlock and fiscal meltdown in the past few years. In paralyzed, polarized Washington, where Democrats refuse to reduce spending without revenue increases that Republicans peremptorily reject, Democrats have accepted spending cuts, Republicans have accepted tax increases, and deficits have come down. It is…

Angelo Volandes’s low-tech, high-empathy plan to revolutionize end-of-life care The Atlantic | May 2013 DR. ANGELO VOLANDES is making a film that he believes will change the way you die. The studio is his living room in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston; the control panel is his laptop; the camera crew is a 24-year-old guy…

The Atlantic | March 2013 THE government shutdown last fall wasted billions of dollars, upset innumerable plans, and besmirched both political parties. But it did have one constructive effect. Surveying the wreckage, grown-ups in both parties realized that the politics of public confrontation is a lot better at closing the government than running it. So, to…

National Journal | December 5, 2012 IF THE AMERICAN economy were an automobile, you would say the transmission is failing. The engine works, but not all wheels are getting power. To put the matter less metaphorically: The economy no longer reliably and consistently transmits productivity gains to workers. The result is that many millions of Americans,…

National Journal | September 27, 2012 AT A salon dinner in Washington recently, the subject was inequality. An economist took the floor. Economic inequality, he said, is not a problem. Poverty is a problem, certainly. Unemployment, yes. Slow growth, yes. But he had never yet seen a good reason to believe that inequality, as such—the widening gap…