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Invading Iraq: What We Were Told at the Time
The costs of the war that began ten years ago tonight are not strictly financial. But for now let's just look at the outlays in dollars and cents. What did the Bush-Cheney administration say about...
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The Coming Age of Space Colonization
A crescent earth rises above the lunar horizon. (NASA/Reuters) Our new issue — yes! subscribe! — contains a two-page Q&A I conducted with Eric C. Anderson. He has had a variety of tech and...
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A Problem Google Has Created for Itself
Over the eons I've been a fan of, and sucker for, the latest automated system to "simplify" and "bring order to" my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS...
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WaPo: The Good, the Bad, Then a Different Good Again
Admirable / good: The Post's columnist David Ignatius (disclosure: a very long-time close friend) begins a column today forthrightly saying that he regrets having supported the invasion of Iraq ten...
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Watching Hacking Attempts in Real Time
This animated graphic by T-Mobile is surprisingly interesting. What you see below is a static screen shot; the site itself says it offers a depiction of ongoing cyber-attacks.Here's the policy point:...
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Finale for Now on Google's Self-Inflicted Trust Problem
Early yesterday I mentioned that while Google's new Keep application, a nascent all-purpose notetaker, looked very interesting, I wasn't going to waste time getting used to it. That is because of the...
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The Rise of Hangar 24
Five years ago today, while I was living in Beijing, I came across news that gave me renewed pride in my "native village," as Chinese people might put it (jiāxiāng, 家乡). A young entrepreneurial couple...
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The Promise and Limits of Google's 'Data Liberation Front'
I figure I might as well go all-in on this topic. Previous entries here and here. Today, two more reader dispatches concerning which parts of your data you can and can't retrieve if a cloud service...
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Anthony Lewis
As I've written repeatedly in this space, journalism is fleeting, and so too is the renown and influence of nearly all its practitioners. Thus it is possible that, even though Anthony Lewis was a...
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If You're in the Mood to Worry About China
Here are three bits of fodder:1) Nuke risk. Self-explanatory from the headline below, in China Dialogue:A little bit of the rationale, via a comparison with Japan (which of course had a mid-scale...
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How I Know I Am Back Home in SoCal
At the wonderful CaCao "Mexicatessen" in Eagle Rock, near Occidental College where my wife and I are based this week, I have my first experience tonight with the products of Cucapa Beer, from Baja....
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The Atlantic, Online and in Print
1) We've had another of the periodic refreshes of our web design. You can see the old look if you click on the name of one of our writers -- for instance, the Ta-Nehisi Coates author site. You can see...
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'What Is the Deal With Donald Trump?' Or With Buzz Bissinger?
I mentioned earlier today that our new Atlantic issue has a lot of very strong stories. One of them, by William D. Cohan, is a delightful profile of America's favorite birth-certificate skeptic, under...
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The Rationale Behind Those 'Caution: Immigrant Crossing' Signs
Recently I mentioned a Baja California-brewed "Runaway IPA" whose label cheekily mocked the famous "immigrants crossing" sign on I-5 and other roads just north of the U.S.-Mexican border. A reader in...
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'Some. Passengers. We. Just. Can't. Move.'
One more chronicle of the Way We Live Now. There is no enormous policy point in this reader's account, but it is an interesting look at several interlacing aspects of modern public life. A reader...
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Paying the Costs of Iraq, for Decades to Come
A little over ten years ago, George W. Bush fired his economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying that the total cost of invading Iraq might come to as much as $200 billion. Bush instead stood by...
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People. Who. Prefer. Not. To. Be. Moved
Yesterday I relayed the story of an airline passenger who asked a fellow business-class traveler to switch seats, so that the first passenger could be next to his wife (as he'd originally been booked)...
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A Note on Formatting, Plus More on Bartleby of the Skies
As mentioned earlier this week, the Atlantic has introduced a new layout for its online "article pages." You get the new look if you click on any headline for a specific post or article, including the...
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Easter Weekend Special: A Reason to Worry Less About the North Korean Threat
Many world news agencies carried this wonderful map, via NKNews.org, of the strike plan Kim Jong-un is preparing, so as to make good on his threat to engulf U.S. cities like Austin and Washington D.C....
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Two Appreciations: Neal Conan, Timothy Noah
The journalism world is a scene of unending flux, but I was particularly sorry to hear of upheaval that affects two of my DC-based colleagues, Neal Conan and Timothy Noah.For the past 11-plus years,...
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