The perilous state of the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. This was initially published in The New Republic in August 2007. By 2008, everybody was talking about infrastructure, including Barak Obama, and Felix Rohatyn had published a New York Times Op-Ed calling for the creation of a national infrastructure bank.

Not that I singlehandedly motivated policy makers to put infrastructure — far from it. But my piece was tagged on TNR’s cover, and generated a lot of discussion. Eventually, it was republished in this compendium of essays on transportation infrastructure.