The Atlantic Archives

A Paucity of Prospects

May 20, 2018

A Paucity of Prospects

Mark Rubin

The Problem

Steve Brill—who created The American Lawyer and Court TV—wrote a fine piece for Time, published a few days ago, titled How Baby Boomers Broke America. (He adapted the article from Tailspin, which is available on May 29.) Mr. Brill aptly describes how my generation—Boomers, but he’s older and richer than I am, and the Boomer period encompassed Americans born between 1946 and 1964—has done well and pulled up the ladders as we wrap it all up. We got ours, and to hell with anyone else.

Matthew Stewart, a philosopher, has written a fabulous piece which you can read on line. (It will appear in The Atlantic’s June

Baby Boomers, Matthew Stewart, paucity of prospects, Steve Brill, Tailspin, The Atlantic

The Rest of Everything

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President Obama’s Foreign Policy

March 12, 2016

Mark Rubin

On Friday, March 11, I read a “can’t put it down” 20,000-word article by Jeffrey Goldberg for The Atlantic: The Obama Doctrine. Mr. Goldberg, a fine writer who focuses on the Middle East, got four substantial interviews with the president in the past few months, on top of many prior conversations.

The piece is a tour de force. And anyone who reads it within the context of the foreign policy debates in the 2016 presidential campaigns—or, for that matter, taking into consideration how the candidates focus on domestic issues—will rue February 27, 1951, the day on which the Minnesota State Legislature ratified the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, barring the election of a president for a