ehm1212

Courtney Martin on America’s power couple: The Clintons have long been America’s Rorschach test for married life and all its complications — infidelity, money, power-sharing, partnership, support, and yes, blow jobs. In the latest chapter of their very public love story, Hillary’s political career, Bill has been asked to do something potentially even more difficult […]

Amanda Marcotte on the advertising culture represented in Mad Men and its effect on youth rebellion: The AMC series Mad Men, an hour-long drama about the lives and loves of Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960s, may still want for a larger audience, but as its awards stack up, and many deem it […]

Gershom Gorenberg on being an Orthodox dove in Israel: The American Jewish filmmaker told me he was doing a documentary on possible answers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one state or two — and human-rights issues. When he showed up at my Jerusalem apartment on a recent afternoon to interview me, he was wearing a […]

Tim Fernholz asks what Sen. Mike Enzi is doing in the middle of the Senate health care negotiations: Health-reform experts were all asking the same question last week: Why the heck is Mike Enzi one of six senators crafting the health-care bill? Enzi, a Republican and the senior senator from Wyoming, is among the small […]

Mark Willis on how to bring reinvestment policy to the 21st century: The world of banking and of community development is very different than it was in 1977 when Congress enacted the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Thirty-two years ago–with cities still in an urban crisis of broad economic decline and with civil-rights legislation only a […]

Paul Waldman on the ugliness of the health-care protests: If you’ve watched any of the growing library of YouTube videos depicting (mostly) middle-aged white guys yelling at their members of Congress during town meetings about health care, you may have had the following reaction: Why are these people so angry? Did that congressman kill that […]

Adam Serwer on community development banks: Late last summer, Gloria Stallworth, a resident of Chicago’s South Side, was hospitalized with stomach pains. The 54-year-old mother and nutritional supervisor at a local hospital was told by doctors that her pain was due to anxiety, and Stallworth knew exactly what was wrong. She was drowning in bills; […]

Doug Kendall and Simon Lazarus on how the Sotomayor hearings shelved the stereotype that progressive judges rule based on their hearts and treat the Constitution as a play toy: As Supreme Court experts rarely fail to point out, Sonia Sotomayor‘s accession to the Supreme Court this week will do little to shift future outcomes in […]

Tim Fernholz on the need to regulate loans: “How many people remember the sub-prime crisis of 1991-1993?” William Black asked me the other day. Black is a longtime federal regulator turned economics professor. We were talking about how the collapse of the housing market in 2006-2008 catalyzed today’s Great Recession. “It’s a trick question,” he […]

Jeff Faux on Bear Stearns and the financial crisis: “We all fucked up,” says Alan Schwartz in the final paragraph of House of Cards. “Government. Rating agencies. Wall Street. Commercial Banks. Regulators. Investors. Everybody.” Schwartz was the last chief executive officer of Bear Stearns, which, when it collapsed in March 2008, became the first of […]