Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Best Time Magazine Writing: Politics & The Economy

After publishing posts last month with my favorite articles from Esquire & Sports Illustrated and then great BusinessWeek and Fast Company features on Bottled Water & BPA I wanted to look next at some of the best stuff I've seen from Time Magazine.

Looking at my favorite Time pieces, I found several were around two related topics... politics and the economy.

Politics

From 2008 came two pieces by the excellent writer David Von Drehle. The first was "The Five Faces of Barack Obama" chronicling multiple views of how the then-candidate was seen and second "The Limits of Race". This story had a subtitle of "For White Working Class, Obama Rises on Empty Wallets" and looked at voters in the key swing state of Missouri and how the economy was influencing their Presidential choice.

The August 2009 issue of Time contained "Inside Bush and Cheney's Final Days" by Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopt. The story was about the VP's attempts to get a Presidential pardon for Scooter Libby and gives a good portrait of Bush and Cheney individually as well as the relationship between the two men.

The Ecomomy

From an October 2008 issue, historian Niall Ferguson did a cover story titled "The End of Prosperity" and then in 2009 there were two pieces from Kurt Andersen (who wrote the bestselling historical novel "Heyday").

The first from Andersen was "The End of Excess: Is This Crisis Good for America?" (which was turned into a book) and second five months later was "The Avenging Amateur". Both featured really interesting writing and a definite optimism for the future.

Great pieces all about these two topics.