Joe Nocera

1 week ago | thefp.com | Joe Nocera

Charlie Peters, the late, great editor of The Washington Monthly, was a connoisseur of bureaucracy. After serving as John F. Kennedy’s West Virginia campaign manager, he arrived in Washington to join a brand-new agency, the Peace Corps, where he was handed one of the most unusual positions ever in the federal government.

2 weeks ago | thefp.com | Joe Nocera

When Did Biden Know He Had Cancer? Five Doctors Weigh In.Is this a story about incompetence? Deception? Or just bad luck? The Free Press called the experts. “They. Covered. Up. His. Cancer,” tweeted the conservative provocateur Clay Travis on Monday, after Joe Biden’s office said that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. It’s easy enough to understand Travis’s logic.

2 weeks ago | thefp.com | Joe Nocera

Every six months for the last few years, I’ve been getting an MRI scan of my brain. There is a little dot in my left frontal lobe—”subcortical white matter,” my chart says, that “may represent a chronic microhemorrhage perennial.” Which, I admit, sounds pretty bad. The dot was discovered after I had an incident in which I blacked out while walking home from lunch one day. It was later diagnosed as a simple partial seizure, which also sounds pretty bad.

1 month ago | thefp.com | Joe Nocera

When a 40-year-old economics professor at Harvard University named Dani Rodrik was preparing to publish his first book in 1997, he sent the manuscript to a fellow economist to ask for an endorsement. The title of Rodrik’s book was Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, and it argued that without government policies to mitigate the downside of free trade, the result would be deep and corrosive social divisions. The economist he approached—Rodrik won’t name him except to say he is “well-known”—declined.

1 month ago | open.substack.com | Joe Nocera

Discover more fromThe Free PressA new media company built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of American journalism. The Intellectual Godfathers of ProtectionismOnce shunned, globalization’s doubters turned out to be right about its destructive economic and social consequences. What do they think of what Trump is doing?