Jim Newell

There comes a time in every company’s life when it must make a crucial decision: Do we hire Mark Penn? Most companies have no problem saying “no” to this question. Penn is the guy whose last high-profile political gig, after all, was losing the 2008 Democratic ...

On September 9, 2009, Congressman Joe Wilson, who had represented South Carolina’s Second District since 2001, shouted “YOU LIE!” at President Barack Obama while he was delivering a speech before a joint session of Congress to boost support for his then-foundering health ...

Those who care deeply about addressing climate change now (or at least now-ish!) have a nasty little problem with which to contend. The short version of this problem is that “people don’t care enough about it.” It’s trickier than that, though. When the ...

House of Cards is a terrible show. It’s cynical in all the wrong ways and it shows a “dark underside” of insider Washington that doesn’t exist. There are no “puppetmasters” like Kevin Spacey’s character in real life—the government is ...

It’s almost time for President Obama to release his annual budget proposal, and the world couldn’t be more not excited. Because the president’s budget proposal, much like his State of the Union address, is another one of those rituals that means very little in ...

It is one of the great Internet mysteries of the last few years: Why does Google Plus still exist? The search engine company’s social network launched in mid-2011 and most people who signed up to “check it out” stopped using it several hours later in mid-2011. ...

The career of famous Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw has taken a strange detour in the past five or so years. The former George W. Bush administration economist and economic adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns has, like many of those on the right, ...

How do we reach the millennials?, the powerful people constantly wonder. They obsess over it. Because they know that if they can only figure it out, the world will be theirs! (Even more so than it already is!) blog has long been fascinated by terrible political appeals to ...