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Looking back on 22 years as editor-in-chief of The Week

Official site of The Week Magazine, offering commentary and analysis of the day's breaking news and current events as well as arts, entertainment, people and gossip, and political cartoons.

Editor’s letter Who will be left to report on the crisis of local news? It’s a troubling question. While a few major national outlets have prospered, in much of the country local reporting is disappearing as large papers retrench and small ones shut down. A great part of this is happening under the radar, because after the lights are turned off, there is nobody left to write the story. In this week’s Last Word, though, journalist Will Oremus reports on what’s happening in his town as the Nextdoor app steadily takes over as the main outlet for local news. It’s worth re...

This article is part of The Week 's special section celebrating the magazine's 20 years in print. It originally appeared in the April 16 issue The Week was born amid a strange stillness. In April 2001, the furor over the contested 2000 election had subsided, and George W. Bush was just 100 days into what one of our early covers called "The quiet presidency." The nation was at peace, and the partisan rancor of the Clinton impeachment was, for the moment, in remission. It was so placid that summer, in fact, that newspapers and TV news paid inordinate attention to several shark attacks on the Ea...

Editor’s letter There’s a specific feeling I get whenever I fly into New York’s JFK airport and start to make the drive home. It feels exactly like turbulence. The roads around the nation’s busiest international air hub are littered with moon crater–size potholes, which make for a juddering and profanity-filled (“Oh, my poor bleeping suspension”) experience. This isn’t a uniquely New York problem: According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 43 percent of roads across the U.S. are in poor or mediocre condition. And the decay goes beyond ...