Al Qaeda's 'Number 2 Leader' Killed—Feel Safer?
Is there anybody left in al Qaeda to kill? More »
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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.
Several readers are aghast at my criticism of President Obama for covertly deploying the Stuxnet computer virus. More »
"When warranted, the United States will respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would any other threat to our country," which may mean the use of "military force." More »
This week opponents of President Obama's prolific use of drone strikes hit the elite-media trifecta. High profile reportage in the New York Times and the Washington Post and on PBS together amplified a question that has been asked more and more by national security experts: Is Obama sacrificing America's long-term security for short-term political gain? The long-term security risk was captured in the lead paragraph of a Washington Post … More »
Chris Hayes said he was sorry for asking the question. But I think the point he was making deserves its day in court. More »
Shadi Hamid, Research Director of the Brookings Institution's Doha Center in Qatar, favors military intervention in Syria by a coalition consisting of Turkey, Arab nations, and western nations. This weekend, in the wake of the killing of some 100 people in the village of Houla, he and I debated the merits of intervening: You can watch the whole conversation on BhTV. More »
I've never been much for hugging people I'm not related to, but it may be time to reconsider. More »
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports:An Israeli settler shot and wounded a Palestinian man on Saturday in a clash that began when a group of settlers set fire to fields belonging to a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank, officials said. This comes exactly a week after another Palestinian was shot by settlers as Israeli soldiers stood by without intervening. All reports must be considered tentative at this point, but according to the Israeli… More »
I found this discussion between two veteran watchers of the Washington foreign policy scene -- Heather Hurlburt and Dan Drezner -- pretty frightening. More »
I hate to say it--and I really do hate to say it--but I told you so. This week's much-anticipated talks between Iran and P5+1 (the permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany) began amid great optimism but ended without even tentative agreement on anything. The good news, such as it is, is that the two sides will meet again in June. The primary sticking point, as I anticipated, was relief from sanctions. Iran, it seems, is open to doing… More »
My Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg is worried that the current round of nuclear talks with Iran won't work out well. I'm worried about that, too (as I said yesterday). But my worry is roughly the opposite of Goldberg's. Maybe by contrasting the two worries I can define a spectrum of Iran-related anxieties, and then anxiety-prone readers can decide where along that spectrum they feel most comfortable. Goldberg worries that the talks won't… More »
Israeli soldiers look on without intervening. More »
Economist Glenn Loury has a gay son, and so does blogger and law professor Ann Althouse. So I wasn't expecting their conversation about gay marriage to take this turn: If you're wishing Glenn had been matched with someone who disagrees with him, I have good news. Here he presents the other side of the argument, which leads to some interesting thoughts from Ann about the role of religion in progressive moral change: More »
The much-anticipated Facebook IPO has come and gone. In terms of optics, it was a flop. The stock closed barely above the offering price and so failed to exhibit the "pop" that it was supposed to deliver. Google, in contrast, saw its stock price rise 18 percent on the first day of trading in 2004. Still, that 18 percent rise left Google valued at $28 billion. Today's trading left Facebook valued at around $100 billion. In this sense, the wisdom of … More »
According to a recent survey, most Facebook users don't trust Facebook to keep their data private. Can't imagine why! I mean, it's not as if Facebook is a company that would--time and again--get you to share more data than you realize you're sharing. And it's not as if the company is run by a guy who in 2004 used private Facebook login data to hack into the email accounts of Harvard Crimson staffers and read their emails. And it's not as if this same guy… More »
It would be good to strengthen moderate voices within Iran and undermine hardliners. More »
Katie Heaney at BuzzFeed has written a funny (in the good sense) piece called "11 Ways You're Annoying on Twitter." Maybe the most predictable of the 11 ways to annoy people is "Tweet about food." Indeed, few things so fill me with ambivalence about following someone on Twitter as when they share the quotidian details of their lives--their food, their kids, their dogs--as if someone other than them cared. More »
Mickey Kaus thinks a Gallup poll shows Obama will lose votes over gay marriage. I think it shows that these kinds of polls aren't worth much. More »
