No Comment — April 12, 2013, 11:11 am
A Final Act for the Guantánamo Theater of the Absurd?
A new report from Seton Hall University exposes government surveillance of attorney–client conversations
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No Comment — April 12, 2013, 11:11 am
A new report from Seton Hall University exposes government surveillance of attorney–client conversations
No Comment, Six Questions — March 18, 2013, 9:00 am
Rashid Khalidi on how the United States sustains the failure of the Israel–Palestine peace process
No Comment, Six Questions — February 4, 2013, 9:00 am
Alex Gibney on his documentary investigating the Roman Catholic Church’s handling of child sex-abuse cases
No Comment — January 18, 2013, 12:43 pm
Congress prepares to slap down prosecutors linked to the suicide of Aaron Swartz
No Comment — January 14, 2013, 11:13 am
A leading cyberactivist commits suicide at twenty-six. Was he hounded to death by federal prosecutors?
No Comment — January 11, 2013, 3:28 pm
By sending a decorated intelligence officer to prison, the Justice Department shields torturers in the ranks of the CIA
No Comment — January 7, 2013, 12:14 pm
The Department of Justice is strangling the pardons process — again
No Comment — December 14, 2012, 9:12 am
A European human rights court hands down the first binding decision against Bush-era rendition techniques
No Comment, Six Questions — December 3, 2012, 2:23 pm
Tina Rosenberg on the British spy novelist who hoodwinked Hitler
No Comment — September 13, 2012, 2:24 pm
“There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember the second.” That quip was offered by Mark Hanna during the first modern professional presidential campaign, that of William McKinley in 1896. But it could just as easily have been voiced by Hanna’s modern understudy, Karl Rove, the man who emerged as the undeniable mastermind of the G.O.P. following their recent convention in Tampa. As Rove understands it, electoral politics has little to do with policy and everything to do with money—in particular with ensuring that his side has a massive advantage over …
No Comment — September 7, 2012, 1:12 pm
The Bush Administration originally created special-detention facilities at Guantánamo on the theory that—given the unique historical provenance of the base, which was secured under a lease at the end of the war with Spain on terms Havana no longer recognizes—no court anywhere in the world would have jurisdiction to deal with the complaints of prisoners held there. Consequently, it would be easier to subject the prisoners to torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment the likes of which America’s prisoners in wartime had never before experienced. The Supreme Court soon put an end to this exercise, and a series …
No Comment — September 6, 2012, 11:00 am
Just days after Attorney General Holder announced a formal decision of impunity resulting from a probe into 101 documented cases in which CIA agents engaged in acts of torture and abuse in apparent violation of CIA guidelines—including those approving torture—further explosive allegations have emerged that lay bare the scope of CIA cooperation with abusive regimes in the era before the Arab Spring. Drawing on interviews with Libyan prisoners previously held by the CIA in black-site facilities, as well as a large cache of secret documents that turned up when rebels seized Qaddafi’s state security offices last year, Human Rights Watch …
No Comment, Six Questions — September 3, 2012, 10:07 am
After four years in the political penalty box, Karl Rove has returned as the undeniable mastermind of the G.O.P.’s electoral effort. Vanity Fair contributing editor Craig Unger has just published a new book, Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power, that focuses on Rove’s fall from grace during the Bush years and his remarkable political resurrection. It shows how Rove’s tactics are remaking the nation’s political landscape and explains why, win or lose in 2012, he is likely to be a dominant force in Republican politics for some time. I put six questions to Unger about his new …
No Comment — August 31, 2012, 12:14 pm
There is some long-settled wisdom among Washington politicos: When you have bad news and want to avoid attention, you release it just before a holiday weekend. And when you can hold off long enough to ensure that it is totally buried, you release it at the most moribund point in the entire news calendar: just before the Labor Day weekend, when no one who counts in American politics is likely to be paying any attention. So what news story was official Washington most eager to bury this year? We have our answer. The New York Times reports: Attorney General Eric …
No Comment, Six Questions — August 22, 2012, 10:59 am
We live in a world in which the private space we are afforded seems to be constantly shrinking. Travelers are subjected to ever-mounting indignities at airports, and those who turn to the seeming anonymity of cyberspace soon learn that someone is keeping careful track of their habits and preferences, and may be putting the information to commercial or other purposes. Now Harper’s Magazine contributing editor Garret Keizer has written Privacy, a close look at an essential social and moral value. I put six questions to him about his new book: 1. You tell us that, “America is a pluralistic society …
No Comment, Six Questions — August 3, 2012, 11:06 am
Alex Cooley Through much of modern history, Central Asia has been a borderland between great empires that vied for influence within it. This came to an end with the Soviet period, which plunged the region into isolation. Now, Barnard College professor Alex Cooley has taken a deep look at the post-Soviet era. In Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia, he finds a sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly rivalry, focused on security issues, between the United States, Russia, and China for influence in the region. I put six questions to Cooley about his new book: 1. …
No Comment — August 1, 2012, 3:33 pm
In the midst of a recent deposition under oath in a lawsuit in which he was seeking to recover money he believed he was owed by the Florida G.O.P., former state party chair Jim Greer used vivid language to describe the situation inside the party when he stepped down. As the Tampa Bay Times summarizes it, he: denounced some party officials as liars and ‘whack-a-do, right-wing crazies’ as he described turmoil in the months before his resignation. Greer said some GOP leaders were meeting to discuss ways they could suppress black votes while others were constantly scheming against each other. …
No Comment, Six Questions — July 20, 2012, 12:00 pm
Measured by revenue, ExxonMobil is the largest corporation on earth. Its operations span the globe, and it behaves like a powerful sovereign, exercising immense influence over the governments of the United States and many other nations in which it has operations. Now two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Steve Coll has written Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, an in-depth study of the company under its past two CEOs, focusing on how it effectively pursues its own foreign policy and deflects demands for fiscal and environmental accountability. I put six questions to Coll about his book: 1. Ida Tarbell published The History of …
No Comment, Six Questions — July 6, 2012, 1:53 pm
The last years of Mozart’s life and the prodigious and important works he created during them have been heavily romanticized in the musical literature. Now, one of this generation’s leading musicologists wants to set the picture straight. In his new book, Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune, Harvard professor Christoph Wolff carefully reconstructs Mozart’s patronage relationships, explores his engagement with Bach and other masters of the polyphonic tradition, and reassesses Mozart’s impassioned turn toward sacred music. I put six questions to Wolff about the book: 1. Many depictions of Mozart’s life, for instance Alfred Einstein’s, have tended to divide …
No Comment — June 28, 2012, 12:25 pm
The Supreme Court has held the news spotlight this week as at no other time in recent memory. The Court’s 5–4 ruling on this year’s cornerstone case, addressing challenges to the constitutionality of Obama’s health-care-reform legislation, proved anticlimactic: it upheld the law, though on somewhat different grounds than most constitutional-law scholars had anticipated before oral argument. Instead of validating the mandate to purchase insurance under the commerce clause, Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion called the mandate a tax. But earlier in the week, in a ruling that may prove equally important, the Court expanded upon its 2010 ruling in Citizens …
Ratio of the number of cicada eggs per square mile of southern New Jersey to the number of stars in the Milky Way:
Jeffrey Lockwood, University of Wyoming (Laramie)/American Museum of Natural History (N.Y.C.)
A Singaporean company unveiled Kissenger, a pair of plastic lips mounted on a large plastic egg, which transmits real-time interactive kisses to a distant lover. “I am not interested in the sexual uses for it,” said the device’s inventor. “We’ve taken several steps to minimize the creepiness.”
The practice of sexualized eyeball licking was causing conjunctivitis in Japanese sixth graders.
