Magazine Articles & Other Longreads
Below are a handful of Andrew's favorite magazine articles and other longreads he's written over the years.
So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class ...
Andrew wrote about Bill Gates' efforts to start an entirely new curriculum in high schools across the country called, Big History. It is a class that is a unified history of the word, offering students a mix of science, history, math and everything in between “We didn’t know when the last time was that somebody introduced a new course into high school,” Gates told Sorkin. “How does one go about it? What did the guy who liked biology — who did he call and say, ‘Hey, we should have biology in high school?’ It was pretty uncharted territory. But it was pretty cool.”
Eight Years After the Crash: Obama's Economic Legacy
Over a series of conversations with Andrew in the Oval Office, on Air Force One and in Florida, Obama analyzed, sometimes with startling frankness, nearly every element of his economic agenda since he came into office. “I actually compare our economic performance to how, historically, countries that have wrenching financial crises perform,” he said. “By that measure, we probably managed this better than any large economy on Earth in modern history.” He has, by his own lights, managed the recovery as well as any president ever could, with results that in many cases exceeded his own best hopes. But despite the gains of the past seven years, many Americans have been left behind. Something has changed, and as he prepares to leave office, Obama seems to understand that his economic legacy might be judged not just by what he has done, but by how the results compare to a bygone era of middle-class opportunity, one that perhaps no president, faced with the sweeping changes transforming the global economy, could ever bring back.
What Timothy Geithner Really Thinks
In interviews with Andrew, Timothy Geithner, the former Treasury secretary discussed his tenure in government and his prescriptions for solving financial crises. Geithner likes to say that all the criticism and the second-guessing and the vitriol directed his way never got to him. “I try to pay no attention to that,” he told me over lunch one afternoon in New York. Almost indignantly, he added, “Our job was to fix it, not to make people like us.” Later, though, he softened and qualified the statement. “I’m human, and I like to be liked,” he said, “even if I didn’t expect to be liked in this.”
Too Big To Fail, The Excerpt in Vanity Fair
With the implosion of Lehman Brothers, in September 2008, the realization dawned: Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs could be next. In an excerpt from his new book, Andrew reveals the incredible scramble that took place—desperate phone calls, seat-of-the-pants merger proposals, flaring tempers—as Washington got tough and Wall Street titans Lloyd Blankfein and John Mack fought for survival.