The Atlantic | July-August 2008 Last year, while he was working in Germany as an engineer for General Motors, Andrew Farah got a call from a senior engineer in Detroit asking him to come home. Why? A car. A special car. Farah had heard about it, of course. The Chevrolet Volt was the automotive sensation…

The Atlantic | May 2008 ALERT Washingtonians were treated to an odd juxtaposition not long ago. John McCain was booed at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the big annual gathering of the right-wing tribes, while trying to establish that he was a conservative. On the same day, across town at the American Enterprise Institute—another conservative…

The Atlantic | January-February 2008 A FEW months ago, in a packed, stuffy room atop a hotel in downtown Washington, a prominent speaker made a startling remark. Even more startling, no one in the audience seemed startled. The audience was a predominantly conservative crowd assembled by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a right-of-center think tank.…

How Bill Clinton, Ira Magaziner, and a team of management consultants are creating new markets, reinventing philanthropy—and trying to save the world The Atlantic | October 2007 HE IS a business consultant, seemingly typical of the breed. Height and build average, hair a graying brown, age 51. His name is Stephen Crolius, and he has…

The Atlantic | July/August 2007 THE presidential campaign is under way. You may have noticed. It has been under way for months. And months. You may have noticed that, too. By the end of the first quarter of 2007, with the election still the better part of two years away, the candidates had already raised…

The Atlantic | April 2007 MITT Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a 2008 Republican presidential candidate, is a thoughtful politician, for a politician. So it was not surprising to find him recently debating one of the country’s core conundrums. It was a little surprising, though, to find him debating himself. Romney believes abortion is…

National Journal | April 14, 2007 DWIGHT EISENHOWER, for all his rambling amiability, was capable of vehemence. He showed it memorably at a news conference on August 11, 1954. Ray L. Scherer of NBC asked him about “increasing suggestions that we should embark on a preventive war with the Communist world, some of these suggestions…

National Journal | March 13, 2007 IN October, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called for “radical international measures” to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions, and fast. “We can’t wait the five years it took to negotiate Kyoto,” he said. Apparently, 2012 is too late. In hopes of taking stronger steps, however, many U.S. environmentalists want to defer…

The Atlantic | December 2006 OVER coffee not long ago, a European diplomat, then completing his five-year tour in Washington, reflected on anti-Americanism. No, he said, it is nothing new. The European left, in particular, has indulged in it for years. But today? Today, he sighed, is different. Since the Iraq War, mistrust of America…

The Atlantic | November 2006 MICHAEL Mateas is the sort of person who once built an artificially intelligent(ish) robot houseplant that monitored your e-mail and changed shape to reflect the mood of what it read—if that sort of person can be said to be a sort. This was in 1998, when Mateas was a doctoral student…