It's just a $5,812,353 contract – chump change for the Pentagon – and not even one of those notorious "no-bid" contracts either. Ninety-eight bids were solicited by the Army Corps of Engineers and 12 were received before the contract was awarded this May 28...
If you thought things were bad, with a barrel of crude oil at $136 and the oil heartlands of our planet verging on chaos, don't be surprised, but you may still have something to look forward to. Alexei Miller, chairman of Russia's vast state-owned energy monopoly,...
The Internet teaches its own lessons, often painfully quickly. In April 2005, I followed an urge, as I often did in those days. Our president, who would soon claim to be spending his spare time absorbing meaty books like King Leopold's Ghost, Lincoln: A Life of...
Be depressed. Be very depressed. You thought that cyberspace – a term conjured up long ago by that neuromancer, sci-fi author William Gibson – was the last frontier of freedom. Well, think again. If the U.S. Air Force has anything to say about it,...
American soldiers have long scrawled messages to the enemy on the bombs they were about to deliver. In the The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes reminds us, for instance, that "Little Boy," the bomb that would inaugurate a new age over Hiroshima, "was...
Here's a memory for you. I was probably five or six and sitting with my father in a movie house off New York's Times Square – one of the slightly seedy theaters of that dawn of the 1950s moment that tended to show double or triple feature B Westerns or war...
Last fall was a great time for official optimism when it came to Iraq. The military "metrics" looked ever better and, as had happened at crucial moments in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, Bush administration and military statements turned practically peachy with the...
Here are words to pin to the Bush years like a wilting corsage: "We don't know what we paid for." That's a quote from Mary Ugone, the Defense Department's deputy inspector general for auditing, concerning massive Pentagon payments made during the occupation and war in...
The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, with its 225,000 or more deaths in 11 countries, shocked the world; so, in recent weeks, has the devastation wrought by a powerful cyclone (and tidal surge) that hit the Irrawaddy Delta of Myanmar. It resulted in at least 78,000...
Back in the mid-1990s, in my book, The End of Victory Culture, I wrote the following about the adventure films of my childhood (and those of earlier decades): "For the nonwhite, annihilation was built not just into the on-screen Hollywood spectacle but into its...
