A honeymoon, at least by design, is a celebration. But it's also a time of testing — a tryout that reveals who holds the power, how it will be exercised and what sort of balance will be struck between cooperation, capitulation and control. This is all the more true when the newly christened union involves a president and his various paramours: the public, the media and the Congress. According to conventional wisdom forged during the tumultuous yet remarkably productive first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt's administration, the "honeymoon period" can set the tone for an entire presidency. ... Read More
Deep Throat Meets Data Mining
January 10, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
If you pay passing attention to the media landscape, you know that most mainstream news outlets have had their business models undermined by the digital revolution. As their general-interest monopolies have been pillaged by niche online competitors, traditional news organizations have lost revenue and cachet, laying off journalists in waves that have grown into tsunamis. This process has created dire prospects for the future of investigative reporting, often seen as the most costly of journalistic forms. In the middle of November, Sam Zell, the occasionally foul-mouthed chief executive ... Read More
The Man Who Bridges Troubled Waters
December 29, 2008 • By • 2 Comments
In 1991, as Aaron Wolf was finishing his doctoral dissertation, the Madrid Middle East peace process was just getting under way. The two sides decided to tackle five sets of regional issues, including the equitable division of water resources. As a budding expert on the subject — his research focused on the Jordan River and its dual role as "a flashpoint and a vehicle for dialogue" — Wolf agreed to advise the U.S. team designing the talks. Fifteen years later, one remnant of that failed attempt at Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking remains: the water negotiations. "They still go on," Wolf ... Read More
Core of the Problem
December 24, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
I really notice the chill in the air when my mechanical pencil freezes — or maybe it has just run out of lead. But it is undeniably cold, 36 degrees below zero Celsius, plus or minus. "The temperature in here is about what it always is at the South Pole," says Geoff Hargreaves, his face turning plum-colored. We are in Denver on a sunny, late September afternoon, but here at the National Ice Core Laboratory the main collections room is kept perpetually frigid, the better to store 14,500 precious cylindrical cores drilled from glaciers near the planet's poles. Hargreaves, the laboratory's ... Read More
The Winter Reading of Our Discontents
December 22, 2008 • By • 1 Comment
On a recent November evening in Miami, an aspiring young writer spoke into a microphone and asked Gore Vidal what advice he had for an aspiring young writer. Vidal — author, political activist, gossip — was onstage in a wheelchair at a Miami Dade College auditorium for an interview with Mitchell Kaplan, who sat across from him. Kaplan is the owner of Books & Books, an independent bookseller in Miami that has magically thrived during the Borders Age in a town whose appetite for narratives would be greater, were the demands of postmodern bacchanalia not so high. Just the same, for a ... Read More
Pay More Attention to Our Own Backyard
December 22, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
A clear lesson of the last eight years is that the world is now too large and complex to be dominated by a single power. Nations that try to exercise unilateral economic and military power will only undermine their moral and material position in the world and contribute to their own decline. A better strategy is for great powers to focus their energies on their own regional spheres of influence, while working with other nations multilaterally to achieve peace, stability and prosperity elsewhere. For the United States, this means ending reckless unilateral interventions in places like Iraq, ... Read More
Find a New Immigration Perspective
December 22, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Conspicuously absent from both 2008 presidential campaigns was a fair, honest and decisive proposal to solve the immigration problem in the U.S., especially with respect to our southern border. Instead, we are told, the "solution" is (1) to grant amnesty of one sort or another to all who are already here illegally, (2) to develop and establish "comprehensive immigration reform" and (3) to offer a "guest worker program." "Comprehensive immigration reform" is merely a sociopolitical euphemism for amnesty, and its principle tenet is the "need for a guest worker program." In point of fact, the ... Read More
