Much of the pre-release debate about “Zero Dark Thirty” has focused on whether it portrays torture as effective, in the sense of prying information out of al Qaeda suspects. Yes, the movie conveys that view, and I think it’s inaccurate. Many experts, including key senators who oversaw ...
Will the scandal surrounding David Petraeus, General John Allen, Paula Broadwell, Jill Kelley, and a shirtless F.B.I. agent turn into the same sort of eureka moment on privacy that Congress experienced when Judge Robert Bork’s video rentals were revealed during a bruising battle over his Supreme ...
The device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone — guess again. It is a tracking device that happens to make calls. We can love or hate these devices — or love and hate them — but let’s start calling them what they are so we can fully understand what they do. Read my ...
Nice news–my New Yorker story about the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad has won the John M. Higgins Award for Best In-Depth/Enterprise Reporting, given out as one of the Mirror Awards ...
My latest story, just published in the Nation, is an essay about Mary Dudziak’s new book, “War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences.” The essay notes that although war ...
Thank you, Guggenheim Foundation!
Don’t worry, my website hasn’t been hacked. The headline for this post is the Russian title of Crude World. The Russian roughly translates as “Cruel World: The Severe Decline of the Oil Era,” which is a bit different from the original wording in English. If you’d ...
How can you turn $3.2 billion into $500 billion in a day? That’s the question I ask in a post on the New York Review of Book’s blog. The answer, if you are Vladimir Putin, the prime minister ...
