American Warscapes
The other day, at the invitation of economics professor Marty Melkonian, I took a rare jaunt out of my hometown to Hofstra University on Long Island and gave a talk in that college's lecture series, The International Scene, to a group of lively young students. It was...
Publish or Perish
Pipelineistan’s New Silk Road
Back before e-mail, a world traveler who wanted to keep in touch and couldn't just pop into the nearest Internet café might drop you a series of postcards from one exotic locale after another. Pepe Escobar, that edgy, peripatetic globe-trotting reporter...
The Long War: Year Ten
Surveillance, America’s Pastime
The dried blood on the concrete floor is there for all to see, a stain forever marking the spot on a Memphis motel balcony where Martin Luther King Jr. lay mortally wounded by a sniper's bullet. It is a stark and ghostly image speaking to the sharp pain of absence....
The War Addicts
The Washington Gossip Machine
We know the endpoint of the story: another bestseller for Bob Woodward, in this case about a president sandbagged by his own high command and administration officials at one another's throats over an inherited war gone wrong. But where did the story actually begin?...
One and a Half Cheers for American Decline
Compare two assessments of the American future: In the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in which 61 percent of Americans interviewed considered “things in the nation” to be “on the wrong track,” 66 percent did “not feel confident that life for our children's...
The American Way of War Quiz
Yes, it would be funny if it weren't so grim. After all, when it comes to squandering money and resources in strange and distant places (or even here at home), you can count on the practitioners of American-style war to be wildly over the top. Oh, those madcap...
