The New Yorker and the Bloom and Rattner Show

Nissan is a sneaky slick little car company. Often overlooked in discussions about the Japanese auto business in America, due to the much higher sales of Toyota and Honda, it still manages to be part of the story. As it is this week in Peter J. Boyer's lengthy New Yorker analysis of what's gone horribly wrong with the U.S. auto industry (you can read the whole thing here for about $5). Boyer uses Nissan's early toehold in "Detroit South"—the company came to Tennessee in 1982, back during the Mr. Mom era—as a way to explain why the Big Three carmakers have struggled mightily of late, financially and politically.

Two worthy pieces of takeaway: First, Boyer gives us the fullest portrait yet of Ron Bloom, the auto task for labor negotiator and stealth co-car czar, alongside potentially disgraced former i-banker and pension-fund hustler Steven Rattner. If Rattner resigns, Bloom—who comes off as a figure of virtuous self-sacrifice, indifferent to earthly rewards despite having made millions—will likely be tasked with leading GM out of "surgical bankruptcy" and nurturing the Fiat-Chrysler merger.

Second, even though General Motors (GM) is down and practically out, the 100-year-old company still has the capacity to wow skeptics who think of it as that big, dumb, corrupt, mismanaged operation that killed the electric car and forced us all to drive gas-chugging SUVs. The General, for all its flaws, does actually have a long history of engineering and design innovation—symbolized by the Technical Center, the Eero Saarinen complex that makes what may be its final beguiling cameo in Boyer's report. Nissan is cool, the UAW will probably never secure for future workers what it achieved in the past, and Detroit South may represent the new model for American carmaking. But they haven't built a Tech Center in Tennessee—not yet, anyway.