The Editors

Dean Baker‘s new book, Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy, explores the stock and housing bubbles at the heart of our current economic crisis. This week, TAP Online is hosting a two-part discussion of the book, featuring Dean Baker, Josh Bivens, Eileen Appelbaum, Danilo Pelletiere, and Ezra Klein. Part one […]

At TAP Online, Paul Waldman says today marks the end of our speculation about how Obama will govern: In the months since he won the Democratic nomination, a series of images of Obama have been constructed by his admirers and foes, assembled out of bits and pieces of reality. Out of an offhand statement here, […]

As we prepare to prepare to inaugurate a former community organizer as our next president and celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.‘s life and legacy, it’s a good time to reread what Kai Wright wrote for the Prospect last year about MLK’s radical, activist bonafides. America began perverting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s message in the […]

Courtney Martin considers the significance of the inauguration: It is not the end of politics as usual. Obama won the election with smart communications, technological innovation, and a savvy vision for the future of our country, but let’s not kid ourselves — hope came at a very, very steep price. Some estimate that Obama’s campaign […]

Gershom Gorenberg writes that both the Israeli government and Hamas made choices that led to bloodshed, and neither side was able to see its full range of options: In war, I thought after I left them, the mind focuses like a telephoto lens. It sees a small picture, without depth, in sharp detail. Any panoramic […]

As we gear up to inaugurate a new president, for our January/February issue the Prospect took a look at the Bush years and surveyed the damage his administration has done to the federal government. In order to roll back the damage Bush has done over the past eight years, we must have some idea of […]

Today we bid farewell to our assistant web editor Sam Boyd, who has left the Prospect to return to sunny Los Angeles. That means we’re looking for a new junior editor to join our web team. (Full job announcement here.) We’ll miss you Sam! Don’t enjoy the west coast too much … –The Editors

Henry Farrel writes that a much-discussed decline in civic engagement is, to the surprise of its theorists, being reversed by partisanship: This academic movement to reverse civic decline had an unusual level of impact outside the ivory tower, because politicians were struggling with the same problems. Bill and Hillary Clinton invited many of the movement’s […]

Robert Kuttner explains why competence is not a substitute for liberalism: In November 2005, the Prospect published an ingenious and influential piece by Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias titled “The Incompetence Dodge.” The article took lethal aim at liberal hawks who had argued that the Iraq War was the right idea; it had just been […]