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Don't Blame Malaysia Airlines
I have an op-ed in Saturday morning's NYT, whose title gets across its point: "Don't Blame Malaysia Airlines." Short version: Airlines rely on regulators and national and international bodies to tell...
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From Inside and Outside the Iron Dome, Once Again
I have received a lot of mail on the technical aspects of the "Iron Dome" system: its origin, performance, strengths, and potential weaknesses, plus comparison with its Patriot predecessors. Watch this...
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America Going to Hell, in 1 Sentence
A woman I know in Washington asked her local health club why the "good" yoga teacher, who was usually scheduled for Saturday mornings, seemed not to be there any more and was replaced by subs. The...
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You Think Your Summer Travel Plans Are Rough? Spare a Thought for People in...
The point of my book China Airborne was that just about everything involving China's potential, and its challenges, could be seen in its ambition to become an all-fronts aerospace power. Chinese...
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California High Speed Rail: 10 Readers With 10 Views
As a reminder: California's plan to build a north-south High-Speed Rail (HSR) system is the most ambitious and important infrastructure project now being contemplated anywhere in the United States. It...
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Interesting News on the Finger-Shoe Front
I am a fan of Vibram Five Fingers running shoe, as I have made clear every few months. I was wearing my trusty Vibrams when I passed the "Haynesworth Test" four years ago. I've worn them as I evolved...
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California High-Speed Rail: Some Views From the Valley
For those joining us late: California's controversial High-Speed Rail project is worth paying attention to, no matter where you live. While everyone moans about America's decaying infrastructure, this...
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Barefoot Running—The Videos
Over the years I've mentioned the famous and fascinating running-related videos from Daniel Lieberman's Skeletal Biology Lab at Harvard. But I haven't done so in a while, and in the context of recent...
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On David Frum, the New York Times, and the Non-Faked "Fake" Gaza Photos
1. A colleague at the Atlantic made a major journalistic error this week. As he has himself admitted, in the first half of a post on our site. Of course I am talking about David Frum, who sent out a...
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The Courts Speak Up for California High-Speed Rail—and So Do Some Readers
As a reminder, this is #7 in a series on the most ambitious and consequential infrastructure project now under consideration in our infrastructure-degraded land. It is the plan for a north-south...
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An Israeli Progressive on His Country’s Moral Culpability
Through this week and still for the next few days, I am out of the country and in unreliable and very expensive Internet range. So for timeliness reasons, I am now posting, without elaborate set-up, an...
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Two Ways of Looking at the Hillary Clinton Interview
On return from a long spell away from the Internet, I was going to recommend that you read Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Hillary Clinton, and not just the setup but the transcript as a whole. But...
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Turning Policemen Into Soldiers, the Culmination of a Long Trend
The images from Missouri of stormtrooper-looking police confronting their citizens naturally raises the question: how the hell did we get to this point? When did the normal cops become Navy SEALs? What...
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When US Law Enforcement Had a Different Look
If you haven't yet seen it, please read this Storify account, by Kelsey Atherton, of how veterans of real combat—in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—view today's wildly over-militarized American...
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Hugh Calkins
I learned recently that Hugh Calkins, a lawyer and educational-reform leader, had died early this month at age 90. He was very well known in Cleveland, where he raised his family and spent most of his...
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Militarization of the Police, Fargo Edition
The stormtrooper look by law enforcement in Missouri has usefully brought into focus the long-term trend of police forces morphing into military units. For previous installments and a reading list, see...
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Third-Party Watch in Maine
First, a disclosure. Eliot Cutler, who nearly won the race to become Maine’s governor four years ago and is now running for the job again, is a close family friend. My wife and I often hung around with...
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Maine Governorship Watch: Let's Hear from the Democrats
Last night I wrote about the upcoming race for the governorship in Maine. Four years ago, the Independent candidate (and my longtime friend) Eliot Cutler narrowly lost to the Tea Party Republican Paul...
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California High-Speed Rail—More Questions and Concerns
If David Letterman can put out a Top Ten list night after night for decades, we can certainly make it all the way to 10 in our chronicles of the California High-Speed Rail debates. As a reminder, this...
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Late Summer Reading, Cheering and Otherwise, but Worth Checking Out
My colleague Alexis Madrigal has a wonderful daily newsletter called 5 Intriguing Things. If you haven’t signed up for it, you can check out back issues here and sign up to get it delivered daily here....
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