The Incoherence of a Drone-Strike Advocate
Max Boot enthusiastically defends drone strikes while apparently giving no coherent thought to their long-term implications. More »
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Has the U.S. Passed Peak Car?
Robert Wright is the author of, most recently, the New York Times bestseller The Evolution of God and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a former writer and editor at The Atlantic. More
Wright is also a fellow at the New America Foundation and editor in chief of Bloggingheads.tv. His other books include Nonzero, which was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book in 2000 and included on Fortune magazine's list of the top 75 business books of all-time. Wright's best-selling book The Moral Animal was selected as one of the ten best books of 1994 by The New York Times Book Review.Wright has contributed to The Atlantic for more than 20 years. He has also contributed to a number of the country's other leading magazines and newspapers, including: The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Time, and Slate, and the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Max Boot enthusiastically defends drone strikes while apparently giving no coherent thought to their long-term implications. More »
Petraeus, his wife, and Paula Broadwell at his CIA confirmation hearings. (AP) When, in the fall of 2011, David Petraeus moved from commanding the Afghanistan war effort to commanding the CIA, it was a disturbingly natural transition. I say "natural" because the CIA conducts drone strikes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and is involved in other military operations there, so Petraeus, in his new role, was continuing to fight the Afghanistan war.… More »
The president has House Speaker John Boehner right where he wants him. More »
Or is this headline just another example of people misunderstanding how statistics work? More »
Sure, the polls and betting markets look good for Obama. But if you search hard enough for glimmers of gloom, they're out there. More »
There's actually something kind of charming about losing your electrical power -- for the first 18 hours. More »
Romney is also more likely to get the American military involved in Syria. More »
Like Gen. Francisco Franco in 1970s episodes of Saturday Night Live, Mitt Romney's momentum is still dead, but this stasis could get disrupted any day now. More »
With three days of tracking poll results in, things look, if anything, a bit worse for Romney than they looked yesterday. More »
With his first-debate bounce gone, he and Obama are in a flat race. On balance, that's probably good news for the president. More »
Obama is more likely to resist the domestic and international pressures that could push the U.S. into war with Iran. More »
Romney sounded like a man trying to tread water and just barely succeeding. Obama sounded more self-assured and more in command of the facts. More »
if we lived in a rational world, a report of direct talks with Tehran would be hailed as validation of Obama's foreign policy. More »
Now that the demise of (the physical version of) Newsweek has been widely taken as emblematic of the fate of magazines generally, here comes the backlash view: Actually, according to Ryan Nakashima of Associated Press, things haven't been so bad for the magazine business as a whole: The water is so warm for the magazine industry that in the first nine months of the year, 181 new magazines were launched while only about a third as many, or 61,… More »
The reaction to African-American faces was found to be weaker in people with racially diverse peers. There's never been good reason to believe that human beings are naturally racist. After all, in the environment of human evolution--which didn't feature, for example, jet travel to other continents--there would have been virtually no encounters between groups that had different skin colors or other conspicuous physical differences. So it's not as if the… More »
I'm kind of amazed at how well the president did -- striking a delicate balance between being feisty not not too aggressive. More »
The president's usual demeanor -- calmly professorial, nerdily expert, and accordingly authoritative -- can be an asset. More »
This week Christopher Peterson, a friend of mine and a psychologist who had shed much light on how negative thinking can kill you before your time, died before his time, at age 62. More than 20 years ago, Chris published a pathbreaking study showing that optimists live longer than pessimists, and since then he had fleshed this story out in various and sometimes surprising ways. For example: he found that people who "catastrophize"--attribute… More »
