In this week's issue, Jon Ward takes a nuanced look at how Liz Cheney's candidacy for a Wyoming senate seat fell apart.
Cheney left the race last week, citing family reasons. But her bid was doomed from the beginning, Jon writes, due to her bullheaded tactics. When the former vice president's daughter found herself up against any sort of adversity, Cheney operated at one speed only: full steam ahead.
From a public break with her lesbian sister over gay marriage to interactions with her senate challenger, incumbent Mike Enzi, Cheney never gave an inch where perhaps two would have been helpful. In the end, Jon writes, "Cheney's campaign-trail mishaps were not just the accidents of a first-timer. They were the inevitable byproduct of her basic approach to political combat."
Elsewhere in the issue, Catherine Pearson explores how adults who are estranged from their parents deal with the idea of parenthood themselves. For some, the answer is to opt out completely.
"There's not an insignificant number of people who just don't have any confidence that they could raise children, because they feel like their role models were so terrible," Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco-based psychologist, told Catherine.
For others, their experiences become a sort of guide to what not to do. "For us, it's really been a lot of talking about, 'How do we do things differently, so we don't follow in those footsteps?'" says Joanna, a 33-year-old parent of a 2 1/2-year-old boy.
In our Voices section, Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy ponders the significance of Ezra Klein's likely departure from The Washington Post, where the star journalist's eight-figure proposal for a new site focused on explanatory journalism was rejected. Kennedy compares the situation to a similar missed opportunity at The Post in 2006, when John Harris and Jim VandeHei left the paper to start Politico.
"The problem with such scenarios is that media executives -- and business leaders in general -- are not accustomed to the idea of giving up control," Kennedy argues. "Legacy news organizations need to find a way to tap into that success outside the old models of ownership and not worry about obsolete notions of employer-employee relationships."
Finally, as part of our continued focus on The Third Metric, we spotlight nine ways to be the master of your own mind.
This story appears in Issue 84 of our weekly iPad magazine, Huffington, available Friday, Jan. 17 in the iTunes App store.