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In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe?

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Seymour M. Hersh - Nov. 08 (Special Report) - In the tumultuous days leading up to the Pakistan Army’s ground offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which began on October 17th, the Pakistani Taliban attacked what should have been some of the country’s best-guarded targets. In the most

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Lawrence Wright: What really happened during the Israeli attacks?

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Lawrence Wright - Nov. 04 (Special Report) - rom the Israeli perspective, at least, the Gaza problem was supposed to have been solved in August, 2005, when Ariel Sharon, then the Prime Minister, closed down the Jewish settlements on the Strip and withdrew Israeli forces. The international community and the Israeli left wing applauded the move. But, almost immediately, mortar and rocket attacks from the Strip multiplied. Five months later, Hamas won its parliament victory. Ari Shavit, a prominent columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, told me recently in Jerusalem, “We dismantled the settlements, and then we sat back and said, ‘Let’s have a new beginning.’ What we got was rockets and Gilad Shalit. People became very angry, and Shalit becomes an icon of that frustration.”

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Some Vaguely Heretical Thoughts on Health-Care Reform: Rational Irrationality

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By John Cassidy - Nov. 04 (Opinion) - With the publication of H.R. 3962, the House Democrats’ mammoth, 1,990-page proposal to restructure the health-care system (the outlines of which can be found in this detailed summary), decision time is fast approaching in the big reform debate. Paul Krugman, in his usual forthright style, says, “History is about to be made—and everyone has to decide which side they’re on.” Democrats and progressives can line up behind the reform legislation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put forward last week, or they can help to kill reform for another generation by aligning with hard-line conservatives.

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Out to lunch

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Nick Paumgarten - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - The week before last, two Northwest pilots overshot Minneapolis, their destination, by a hundred and fifty miles, apparently oblivious of their instruments and their internal clocks, as well as of a barrage of increasingly desperate radio calls from air-traffic control. Afterward, they explained that they’d logged onto their personal laptop computers and become so engrossed—not in FarmVille or porn, or even good old off-line activity, such as a fistfight or a nap, but, rather, if you believe them, in the nuances of the airline’s new crew flight-scheduling procedure—that they’d essentially forgotten where they were and what they were supposed to be doing. Which was landing a plane. The equivalent for a text-messaging driver might be for him to veer off a turnpike into a cornfield and drive twenty miles through the corn rows—stalks thumping the hood, G.P.S. lady losing her mind—without once looking up from the task of typing a heartfelt response to a wireless provider’s auto-generated telemarketing text. That is, it’s almost unimaginable.

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The White House’s war with Fox News

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Louis Menand - Oct. 26 (Opinion) - In 2008, half the people who watched the Fox News Channel were over sixty-three, which is the oldest demographic in the cable-news business, and, according to a poll, the majority of the ones who watched the most strident programs, such as Sean Hannity’s and Bill O’Reilly’s shows, were men. All that chesty fulminating apparently functions as political Cialis. Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have rage lasting more than four hours.

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How different are dogfighting and football?

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Malcolm Gladwell - Oct. 15 (Opinion) - .......I had never passed out like that before, and I started becoming really paranoid. I went into a panic. ....... I started to lose control. My limbs were shaking, and I couldn’t speak. I was conscious, but I couldn’t speak the words I wanted to say.” Turley is ...... thirty-four years old,

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Reading the McChrystal Report

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By George Packer - Sep. 24 (Opinion) - It’s not the Pentagon Papers. After all the noise and controversy, the assessment of the war in Afghanistan by General Stanley McChrystal that was leaked to the Post’s Bob Woodward turns out to be a singularly unsurprising document. Its emphasis isn’t on more troops (which is what all the discussion in Washington inevitably comes down to) but on a better approach to counterinsurgency. It’s a distillation of all the recent discoveries and rediscoveries made by the military under General Petraeus, with the advice of experts like David Kilcullen.

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Are Obama's judges really liberals?

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jeffrey Toobin - Sep. 16 (Special Report) - The Obama Administration wanted to send a message with the President’s first nomination to a federal court. “There was a real conscious decision to use that first appointment to say, ‘This is a new way of doing things. This is a post-partisan choice,’ ”

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It’s Always the Fixer Who Dies: Interesting Times

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By George Packer - Sep. 12 (Special Report) - It’s difficult not to feel a certain bitterness about the death of Sultan Munadi. He was what journalists call a “fixer,” the local man or woman who helps the foreign correspondent. The help takes every conceivable form: interpreting, finding the phone number of the Iraqi member of parliament, knowing the personal history of the Afghan battalion commander, setting up interviews, hiring a car and driver, figuring out where to get food on a long drive in the desert, dispensing political analysis and cultural insight and—sometimes most importantly—security advice, about this or that contact, this or that road.

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Zappos, the online shoe shopping utopia

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Alexandra Jacobs - Sep. 09 (Special Report) - Owning a large collection of shoes in various styles and colors has, in the past decade, gone from being considered a sign of ultimate imperial excess (Imelda Marcos) to a constitutional right of the average American woman, and Zappos is at least partly responsible.

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Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By David Grann - Sep. 03 (Special Report) - The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and . . .

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Health Care Hyde Park

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Hendrik Hertzberg - Aug. 13 (Opinion) - Why do interests like the health-care industry have so much money and influence? I am convinced that the underlying cause can be found in the unique hydraulics of our centuries-old political mechanisms.

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Health-care Reform and Congress

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Hendrik Hertzberg - Aug. 02 (Opinion) - Pretty much everybody who believes that health care should be a human right, not a commercial commodity, and who makes a serious study of the abstract substance of the matter, concludes that the best solution would be (to borrow Obama’s words at the press conference) “what’s called a single-payer system, in which everybody is automatically covered.” But, by the same token, pretty much everybody who believes the same thing, and who makes a serious study of the concrete politics of the matter, concludes that a change so sudden and so wrenching—and so threatening to so many powerful interests—is beyond the capacities of our ramshackle political mechanisms.

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Answers to Questions

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jeffrey Toobin - Jul. 26 (Comment) - Justices make choices, based largely, though not exclusively, on their political views of the issues involved. In reaching decisions this way, Justices aren't doing anything wrong; there is no other way to interpret the majestic vagueness of the Constitution. But the fact that Judge Sotomayor managed to avoid discussing any of this throughout four days of testimony is indicative of the way the confirmation process, as it is now designed, misleads the public about what it is that Justices do.

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Cocksure

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Malcolm Gladwell - Jul. 23 (Special Report) - Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn’t know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street’s crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological.

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XXXL

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Elizabeth Kolbert - Jul. 20 (Review) - The human body is “mismatched” to the human situation. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,” Power and Schulkin write. “We now live in Candyland.”

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Enter Laughing: Al Franken joins the Senate

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By John Colapinto - Jul. 19 (Special Report) - "He’s always had this amazing work ethic, an infinite amount of energy and intelligence and concentration, and now he’s finally bitten into something that’s really substantial.”

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The Al Qaeda Paradox

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Steve Coll - Jul. 17 (News Analysis) - Compared with their position in the period from 2002 to 2004, Al Qaeda and its affiliates, such as Jemaah Islamiya in Indonesia (which has been involved in hotel bombings similar to the attack today on the Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton in Jakarta), have become politically marginalized.

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Priced to sell

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Malcolm Gladwell - Jul. 05 (Review) - At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.”

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Caveat Mortgagor

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By James Surowiecki - Jul. 05 (Opinion) - In 1937, the Massengill Company began selling a health product called Elixir Sulfanilamide, which contained one of the antibiotic sulfa drugs. Unfortunately, it also contained diethylene glycol, a solvent that happens to be deadly to humans. In a matter of months, the elixir killed more than a hundred consumers. The next year, Congress passed the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, requiring new drugs to be proved safe before they hit the market.

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Stonewall Plus Forty

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Hendrik Hertzberg - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - The President has said all the right things. But there have been signs, before the election and after, that where gays are concerned his fine-tuned ear for the emotional resonance of his actions has an alloy of tin.

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Letter from Tehran: With the Marchers

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - Jun. 28 (Special Report) - On the afternoon of June 15th, I bumped into my old friend Reza at the huge demonstration on Azadi Street—the march that nobody will ever forget. He was with his wife, Hengameh, his arm raised, giving the “V” sign for victory and shouting, “Death to the dictator!” Then he saw me. His eyes widened and we kissed on both cheeks. “How many?” he asked breathlessly, before answering himself. “A million, I’d say.” I had last seen Reza a few months before, in the small office where he runs a modest trading business. He had looked pale and tired, and was complaining about money problems. But now was different. He shone. “Come to dinner tomorrow night,” he called, and then we were separated.

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Protest Vote

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Laura Secor - Jun. 28 (News Analysis) - More than a hundred Iranian reformists have been arrested in the turmoil following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hastily declared victory in the June 12th Presidential election. Among them is Saeed Hajjarian, who had been a political consultant to former President Mohammad Khatami. In 2000, Hajjarian was shot in the face by an assassin who was widely believed to have been in the employ of the intelligence ministry. Hajjarian had once been a high official in the intelligence apparatus, and he was suspected of being the source of stories in a reformist newspaper tying the ministry to the grisly murders of dissidents. He survived the shooting, but was left partially paralyzed and is dependent on the constant care of doctors and family. He speaks with difficulty, and his office in the reformist-party headquarters contains a hospital bed. His doctor says that keeping him in detention without proper medical care could endanger his life.

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Understanding The Basij

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jon Lee Anderson - Jun. 19 (Special Report) - These Basijis are usually scruffy working-class men, and thus bring an element of notional “class struggle” to the otherwise pragmatically lived lives of the citizens of the Islamic republic. Not surprisingly, among more educated and affluent Iranians, they are almost unanimously despised.

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The secret of self-control

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jonah Lehrer - Jun. 18 (Special Report) - he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

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