Archived Articles

Four articles that appeared in Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine are included here in revised form. “Silo Busters” is a history of the MX missile, the U.S. Air Force’s last ICBM project.  It portrays the labyrinthine politics and theory about nuclear weapons during the years before President Reagan’s science-fictional Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program. Biographical information about the main characters has been added to the original Harper’s text.  The three Times articles have been amended to correct awkward editing, while maintaining their original factuality. “The Endless Countdown,” one of the first critical investigations of the space shuttle program in the national press, was commissioned in the fall of 1979 and describes the shuttle’s troubled technical status, its tortuous budgetary history, and some of the flawed components that would later lead to deadly failures. “Restocking the Chemical Arsenal” was instigated by the U.S. Army’s plan to manufacture so-called binary nerve-gas munitions. Based on interviews with military officials, it provides a comprehensive and still-relevant view of how chemical weapons work and could be used. “Neutron Bomb” describes how that specialized nuclear weapon, rarely discussed with technical accuracy, fit in the military and political landscape of the Cold War. This text restores a detailed description–oddly deleted from commercially archived versions of the article–of how the Army planned to use these bombs against Soviet troops on the European battlefield.

“The Truth About Lie Detectors” appeared in Discover in March 1986, during the Reagan administration’s push to spread the use of polygraph exams throughout the federal government.  It details polygraphy’s lack of scientific validity, which is still the case today at a time when the Defense Department alone conducts more than 43,000 tests per year, according to a 2011 report by the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.   A July 2012 memorandum from the Director of National Intelligence directed all agencies that perform polygraph tests to use them to find individuals who leak classified information, particularly to the news media. In 2002, the National Academies concluded that polygraph screening was “intrinsically susceptible to producing erroneous results.”  The American Psychological Association maintains that “most psychologists and other scientists agree that there is little basis for the validity of polygraph tests.”

“A Great New Enterprise” appeared in Air & Space Smithsonian magazine’s June/July 1989 issue to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. It contains poignant interview remarks by top NASA managers of the era, such as James Webb and Robert Seamans, as well as scientific advisers such as Jerome Weisner.

“Profiting Off the Fat of the Land” is the complete text of a keynote speech given at the annual convention of the American Medical Writers Association in Chicago on November 8, 1996.  It relates the history of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a controversial diet pill called Redux (fen-phen).  In September 1997, the FDA took Redux off the market after it was associated with lung and heart valve damage.  An estimated six million people took the drug.  American Home Products, Redux’s manufacturer through its Wyeth subsidiary, was eventually forced to set aside $21.1 billion to cover litigation.  A condensed version of the speech appeared in the 12/30/96 issue of The Nation.

“Anxiety, Anonymity, Amnesia” appeared in Harper’s in February 2003 as a “Letter from Washington.” The reaction of the Bush-era hometown establishment was registered by a Washington Post reviewer named Peter Carlson, who foreshadowed Trump-era trollery by calling it a “sneering strain of elitist liberalism.” This one’s for you, Lewis.

”Anger” was published in the September 2005 edition of Johns Hopkins Magazine devoted to the seven deadly sins.

”Mr. Kramer” was published in the Baltimore Sun on August 8, 2010, to mark the 100th anniversary of Boy Scouts, whose Eagle rank the author attained a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The national organization filed for bankruptcy in February 2020.

”A Galvanized Man” is a short story acquired in 1982 by Playboy’s esteemed fiction editor, Alice K. Turner . Payment was $6000, about $16,000 in 2020–adequate exchange for a young writer’s soul. Just before publication, it was spiked higher up the masthead for being “not macho enough,” Turner said at the time. For many years, she did the best she could, which was often very good, heaven knows. She always seemed amused, and a bit bemused, by being there. (“Cheshire puss, would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”) All of this is rather jarring to conjure today.