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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.” In days of yore, when The Bomb was new and the Commies were everywhere everyday, the halls of academe and government teemed with suits who made prosperous livings by theorizing about how Washington’s nukes and Moscow’s nukes matched up against each other. From the paskudnyak Herman Kahn’s homebuilt Hudson Institute to the endowed chairs of […] Bill Broad and David Sanger seem to have nothing else to do in the twilight of their New York Times careers than beat the North Korea anxiety drum. In the tradition of Drew Middleton, who never met a general whose bugle he wouldn’t blow on page one, they continue to pen the creative nonfiction prologue […] What better way to begin another embattled year for American journalism than reading James Risen’s Intercept account of how top editors at the New York Times dragged the polish off their shoes to delay publishing revelations about NSA domestic spying? It takes a long, long time to rise to that paper’s masthead–years of demonstrating what […] With the end of another year in sight, this is traditionally a time to take stock. Fitting, then, that two news stories of the past week were about matters that defy commentary not because they are complex, but because they are too stupid for words. One, about the Pentagon having spent $22 million on “Advanced […] The proliferation of commercial satellites that take photos-for-sale of the Earth’s surface long ago spawned a small industry of shops that will study these pictures and tell you what they think is going on down there. Applications for agriculture, city planning, et cetera are obvious, but there is a lucrative subset of the business that […] The New York Times treated Gil Rogin to a hometown boy’s obit today, evidence of how glorious it was to be born in Brooklyn before WWII and then climb the golden ladder in Manhattan. It was his good fortune to sell funny innocuous stories to The New Yorker when its readership was still comprised mostly […] |