- Hendrik Hertzberg: Finding “Top Secret America.”
These are hard times for newspapers, and not just the Times. America’s other iconic daily of the past half-century, the Washington Post, has been doing a long, slow fade, speeded up lately by the Great Recession. The Post’s weekday circulation is barely two-thirds what . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Lies
After the tea-partying, town-meeting-disrupting, pistol-packing mensis horribilis of August, more than a few commentators complained, as one of them put it, that “Obama should have seen it coming.” No one doubted that the current attempt to overhaul America’s uniquely wasteful and unjust . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Obama’s nuclear spring.
Now then, Dmitri. You know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb. The bomb, Dmitri. The hydrogen bomb. —President Merkin Muffley to Premier Dmitri Kissov, 1964.
Dmitri, we agreed.—President Barack Obama to President Dmitri Medvedev, 2010.
“Dr . . ....
- Evan Osnos: Japan, Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, and nuclear power.
On the afternoon of March 11th—a Friday—the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, on Japan’s Pacific coast, had more than six thousand workers inside. The plant, about a hundred and fifty miles north of Tokyo, is painted white and pale blue and is a labyrinth . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Seymour M. Hersh: How real is the nuclear threat?
Is Iran actively trying to develop nuclear weapons? Members of the Obama Administration often talk as if this were a foregone conclusion, as did their predecessors under George W. Bush. There is a large body of evidence, however, including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Sorting out the Senate.
The hundred and eleventh Congress, which had emitted more than a few whimpers along the way, ended with a fusillade of bangs. Reconvening for the last time after the shock of November’s Republican wave, the outgoing, still Democratic Congress legislated with unwonted vigor and speed. In the six . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Trash talk from the 2008 campaign.
8220;Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime,” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (Harper; $27.99), has come along just in time. The nation’s political and political-commenting classes, whose nervous systems atrophy without a reliable supply of . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Sexual abuse and the Catholic Church.
On October 31, 1517, a Roman Catholic priest and theologian, Dr. Martin Luther, put the finishing touches on a series of bullet points and, legend has it, nailed the result to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany—the equivalent, for the time and place, of uploading . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: The Afghanistan strategy.
There are no good options for the United States in Afghanistan. That has been the conventional wisdom for some years now, and this time the conventional wisdom—the reigning cliché—happens to be true. President Obama did not pretend otherwise in his address at West Point last . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Glenn Beck’s George Soros shows.
It’s hardly news when Fox News airs something nasty. This time, though, it’s personal—or, at least, institutional. Recently, the nation’s highest-rated cable-news network’s biggest star devoted three hour-long episodes of his program to an attack on a . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: What lies ahead for Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.
If politics is show business for ugly people (which, by the way, it’s not, not this time, not the ugly-people part anyway, not with a cast of characters as glossy as Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin’s ghost, and Barack Obama), is Occupy . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: The Fifth War
In the sixty-four years since V-J Day, the United States has fought five wars big enough to be styled “major.” Two of these, Vietnam (1962-75, by the most common reckoning) and Iraq (2003-11, with any luck), were conceived in sin. Their beginnings were fatally compromised by . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Nobel Surprise
If President Obama really had to get a gift postmarked Scandinavia this month, he would probably, on the whole, have preferred the Olympics. At least at the Olympics the judges wait till after the race to give you the gold medal. They don’t force it on you while . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Obama and the battle of the amendments.
There is the current crop of Ohio Republicans, and then there are those who art in Heaven. A specimen of the former, ultimate destination unknown, is Speaker of the House John Boehner, a perpetrator (and, arguably, a victim) of the terrifying debt-limit arson that his party, on fire with . . ....
- Nick Paumgarten: How to survive a terrorist attack.
Last month in Washington, President Obama convened world leaders to discuss the dangers of nuclear proliferation and of inadequately secured nuclear material. For people of a certain furrowed cast of mind, the summit revived fears of a nuclear terrorist attack on an American city. Over the years, Cassandras have conjured . . ....
- Nuclear Medicine Diagnoses Organ Damage
In the diagnosis and analysis of a patient's internal organs a doctor may prescribe the use of a nuclear medical collimator to scan the patient for damage, disease, or internal bleeding. By focusing low-level gamma rays the nuclear medical scanner can detect small inconsistencies that may have been missed in other examinations....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: A new history of Britain’s role in the American Civil War.
For the first fourscore and, oh, six or seven years after our fathers brought forth what they brought forth, the former owners of the new nation did not always regard it with the unmixed admiration and respect that the noisiest ex-colonists considered their due. From the beginning—from . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Who wants to bomb Iran?
When WikiLeaks dumped its first trove of purloined State Department cables on the world last week, Fast Company ran the whole thing through “a simple word cloud generator,” a computer application that uses different lettering sizes to depict the frequency with which specific words appear in a given . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Obama vs. the spill.
For the young Presidency of Barack Obama, and for the nation, this hellish summer of discontent started in balmy spring, on the evening of April 20th, forty miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. At first, after the explosion aboard the giant oil rig Deepwater Horizon, the . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: The letters of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Despite the well-established American loathing of politicians as a class, everything seems to get named after them. (Everything public, that is. In the private, semiprivate, and nonprofit sectors, marquees tend to feature big donors and, increasingly, big corporations. Citi Field, indeed.) Politicians who get elected President have pride of . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Behind Obama’s clean-energy strategy.
The day after President Obama delivered his second State of the Union address last week, dozens of Web sites turned it into a “word cloud,” graphically showing the relative frequency with which particular words appeared. One such cloud-seeding Web site was none other than www.whitehouse.gov, where, as . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Behind Obama’s clean-energy strategy.
The day after President Obama delivered his second State of the Union address last week, dozens of Web sites turned it into a “word cloud,” graphically showing the relative frequency with which particular words appeared. One such cloud-seeding Web site was none other than www.whitehouse.gov, where, as . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg:
On May 13, 1943, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered. The Allies suddenly found themselves saddled with nearly three hundred thousand prisoners of war, including the bulk of General Erwin Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps. Unable to feed or house their share, the British asked their American comrades to . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Obama’s fighting words.
President Obama’s first State of the Union address came at the end of the most harrowing nine days of his young Administration. On January 19th, a Republican won the Massachusetts seat that had been held for nearly half a century by Edward M. Kennedy, thereby depriving the Senate . . ....
- Chevy Convertibles Making a Strong Comeback
With much of the American auto industry in peril at the beginning of the new decade, it may seem like an unlikely time for a company like Chevrolet to stage a successful comeback - but with sales of new models of some of their classic designs on the rise, they seem poised to do just that. Car trends may come and go, but convertibles have demonstrated an enduring appeal, thanks to their...
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Rick Perry’s Supreme Court idea.
After a hearty howdy, it was a long goodbye for Rick Perry. In mid-August, when the square-jawed, tin-tongued governor of Texas rode into the race, he went to the head of the pack at a gallop. And a Gallup: in that poll, he instantly lassoed a third . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Did Mitt Romney beat Rick Santorum in Iowa?
Last week, after the former governor of Massachusetts “defeated” the former senator from Pennsylvania in the Iowa Republican caucus, the commentariat was faced with a conundrum. We know who “won,” but who really won? The tally was as close to a tie as has ever been . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: What were the voters thinking?
Barack Obama had the mot juste last Wednesday for what had just befallen him and his party: a “shellacking.” The President’s choice of word was one syllable (and one “g”) longer than his predecessor’s summary after a parallel midterm debacle. But, then . . ....
