Larissa MacFarquhar has written a brilliant, insightful profile of Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, his wife and intellectual partner.

Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he’d done for Rolling Stone. He had written, “As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders,” and after this she inserted the sentence “Worse yet, he’ll get obstruction and lies.” Where he had written that the stimulus bill would at best “mitigate the slump, not cure it,” she crossed out that phrase and substituted “somewhat soften the economic hardship that we face for the next few years.” Here and there, she suggested things for him to add. “This would be a good place to flesh out the vehement objections from the G.O.P. and bankers to nationalization,” she wrote on page 9. “Show us all their huffing and puffing before you dismiss it as nonsense in the following graf.”

To get a sense of how Wells thinks about politics, the following biographical note is instructive.

Unlike Wells, who was so upset when Reagan was elected that she moved to England, Krugman found Reagan comical rather than evil.

Read the whole thing. MacFarquhar demonstrates why The New Yorker is still a national treasure. What (I’ll never understand is why a magazine that excels at this kind of reportage feels a need to publish fairly banal opinion journalism.) The beauty of MacFarquhar’s profile is that it lets you draw your own conclusions.

I’ve often written that Paul Krugman has become the most effective left-of-center polemicist in the United States, as effective in his own way as Rush Limbaugh. I know feel as though I’ve done Robin Wells a disservice by not acknowledging her centrally important role, and I wonder if it is entirely fair that she doesn’t share a byline on Krugman’s columns.