Here is a piece done for the New York Times, art directed by Minh Uong. It was an article about the Recovery Act, and even though it hasn't done what everyone had hoped for, we would have gone off a cliff without it.
Here is an excerpt from the article in Sunday's NY Times:
"After listening to Representative Paul Ryan in the vice-presidential debate, you might think that careful evaluation isn’t needed. In his view, we spent $800 billion on stimulus, yet unemployment still rose to 10 percent, so obviously it wasn’t helpful.
To understand what’s wrong with that reasoning, think of someone who’s been in a terrible accident and has massive internal bleeding. Following life-saving surgery, the patient i still feels rotten. But we shouldn’t conclude from this lingering pain that the surgery was useless — because without it, the patient would have died."