September 2009

The other night, at one of those standard-issue media cocktail parties at a bar on the Lower East Side—the type of casual post-work affair that was a dime a dozen in 2005, back when people had both work and the desire to congregate at a geographically convenient watering hole after it—I ran into Q, a former colleague of mine. We'd worked together for 18 months at the same magazine a couple of years back, after which he left to take a gig at a fashion rag and I went to work at a newspaper.

The new documentary What’s the Matter With Kansas? is a funny, smart and important look at the intersection of religion and politics in America today. Loosely based on the 2004 book by Thomas Frank, it tells the stories of several conservative Kansans who care deeply about hot-button cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage.

It was February 2008, and Henry M. Paulson Jr., a prince of Wall Street turned secretary of the Treasury, was reflecting on his biggest achievement to date: a $168 billion economic-stimulus package that had passed Congress four days earlier after swift, bipartisan prog ress through both houses. In light of all the later twists and turns that the global financial system and the national economy took, this measure would come to seem quaint and fainthearted.