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American mass culture no longer lionizes writers of literary scope while also amplifying their personal voice on the great social and political issues of the day. Post-war archetypes like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal are gone and–I can attest as a teacher of undergraduates–forgotten. The death of Tom Wolfe marks the disappearance of another member […] The military secrecy industrial complex got a nice cadeau from Chief Judge Colleen J. McMahon of the Southern District of New York last week, which will enable the CIA not only to manufacture secrets but selectively market them outside its own shop. As succinctly explained by Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News, McMahon ruled that the […] The release of a heavily redacted table of contents from the secret cybersecurity research journal JSCoRE highlights the audacity of a hermetically sealed intelligence community that feels free to call this homegrown publication “widely-recognized, high-quality” because, well, trust us. That it is similarly deemed to be “peer-reviewed” adds another layer of chutzpah to the illusion […] Anyone in academic circles expressing dismay over the apparent demise of the “U.S-Korea Institute” at Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington now that the government of South Korea has cancelled its funding might pause to ask why Seoul was paying for USKI lock, stock, and barrel in the first place. Hopkins is […] If Google were to take the (highly unlikely) step of nixing participation in Project Maven, employees gung-ho about military tech can always jump to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which has never seen a Pentagon dollar it wouldn’t glom (most of its budget is secret, so I’m compelled to make this reasonable assumption). With […] Like “yellow rain” and aerosolized anthrax, we now have another wide-open accusation of Soviet–well, okay, Russian–CBW capers that will be denied and disparaged by Moscow while Western governments sit tight on whatever evidence they claim to possess. Thank goodness that Matthew Meselson at least put an end to the bee poopIf untreated, the disease can […] The Pentagon has decided to pull its blackout curtain over news about Ballistic Missile Defense flight tests, claiming a need to “safeguard critical defense information.” That this need has never existed before for such trials raises the timeworn question of whether what’s so terribly critical is the information or the risk of embarrassment. The latest […] News that Russia is developing a nuclear-powered cruise missile will send aerospace buffs to the history stacks to peruse Project Pluto, a wacky 1950’s U.S. Air Force project that epitomized Cold War technophilia. About $2 billion in today’s dollars swirled down the loo before it was cancelled in 1964. No doubt such contraptions wouldThis herbal […] Daytime temperatures returned to the normal mid-60’s this weekend in Los Angeles, but for the past couple of weeks they rose to the paradisiacal 80’s in clear skies and sweet morning air that answered the old question of why anyone would want to live here in a semidesert on the grinding edges of two tectonic […] Required reading on State-of-the-Union day. “History is kind of, you know, it’s quirky sometimes.” |