This week's New Yorker seems like a kind of bookend to the famous September 24, 2001 issue. I read that one feverishly, full of dread. I've been reading this one full of more pleasant emotions: relief, deep satisfaction, and hope.
My favorite passage, the conclusion of David Grann's article on how Obama won:
He told Axelrod, "I am not a great candidate now, but I am going to figure out how to be a great candidate." One of Obama's greatest achievements as a politician is that he somehow managed to emerge intact, after navigating two years of a modern and occasionally absurd Presidential race, while also becoming a great candidate. On Election Night, as he once against invoked the words of Lincoln, he seemed to be saying that he was going to figure out how to be a great President.
And George Packer invokes jazz in the conclusion of his piece on the beginning of a new era in American politics:
The great American improvisation called democracy still bends along the curve of history. It has not yet finished astounding the world.
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