In about ten minutes I’m going to get a call from New York, where I’ll be talking live and nationwide on WNYC’s The Takeaway about the collision between the Dubai assassination and spy fiction… *RING!*   Later: Well, it happened–a 4-minute window that went by in about 40 nanoseconds. Celeste Headlee did a great job, but [...]

I’ve seen several newspaper comment pieces this week, bemoaning the people who cite the current cold snap as proof that the whole global warming debate is a load of nonsense. They point out that we can no more use one cold spell as proof against global warming than one warm spell can be used as [...]

I came across Seth Marko’s post, which I thought must’ve been some sort of mistake. But no, it’s not. Says the Philadelphia Free Library, We deeply regret to inform you that without the necessary budgetary legislation by the State Legislature in Harrisburg, the City of Philadelphia will not have the funds to operate our neighborhood [...]

I am heading out for a week of family vacation, but I leave you all with a review I have out this weekend in The Washington Post.  The book, Methland by Nick Reding, is pretty terrific.  Methland is a social history of methamphetamine in American culture, but Reding looks at this history through the lens [...]

Germany is enthralled with the revelation that a dramatic political event, which ushered in reforms and reshaped the new Germany may have actually been a work of espionage. In  1967, while participating in a left-wing protest against the visit of the Iranian Shah, German university student  Benno Ohnesorg was shot in the back of the [...]

This Slate article on the re-emergence of the apocalyptic thriller raises the question: How is the current world crisis affecting reading tastes?  Fellow Nomad Olen Steinhauser told me recently that his publisher believed that the crisis will be good to thrillers. (Meaning, the thriller fiction market may not shrink like the rest of the industry, [...]

As the days are drifting away into Christmas and on to the end of the year, I thought this was an appropriate moment to look back over the last twelve months. And what a year it’s been, to the extent that the election of a black President in the US might prove to be only [...]

In a follow-up to the previous post, I was dumbfounded to read comments today by the new British Defence Secretary, John Hutton, drawing the parallels between Afghanistan and the two global conflicts of the last century. Hutton claimed Afghanistan was as important to Britain’s national interest as those two wars had been, and went on [...]

A break from editing to mark the fact that tomorrow is the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War, the “war to end all wars”. The lunacy of that conflict, the pointless sacrifice of so many young men, and the many ironies (thousands died after the armistice had been signed, thousands more [...]

Super Tuesday was, in the end, as everyone expected only less so. John McCain didn’t quite become the Republican contender for the White House, but he’s close enough to make it look like a certainty. I’ve heard from a few people that he’s difficult to work with but of course, sometimes that can make for [...]

…though, as usual, I’m late to the game discovering it: The argument that America’s presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, “The Quiet American.” It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young [...]

Periodically, Foreign Policy magazine produces what it calls the Terrorism Index, a poll of “more than 100 of America’s most respected foreign-policy experts”. It’s an interesting project, if only to note the movement of confidence over the years. Here’s a link to the third such Index, which, over ten pages, gets pretty detailed, while suggesting [...]

Today, I have some scary statistics for you… but first, an apology for not posting in a while. Olen is busy with different things, Robin is WALKING ACROSS EUROPE (!) and John is like those rare migrating birds, posting rarely but in such a way that it’s worth the wait. As for me, I’ve been [...]

I felt I had to say something about the announcement today that Prince Harry will not be allowed to go and fight alongside his troops in Iraq because it’s too dangerous. There were known threats from insurgents (no kidding!) and, the ultimate cop-out, his presence would also endanger the lives of his troops (insert joke [...]

Olen asked me to say a few words on the news story of the day, the final reveal on that worst-kept secret in British politics, the fact that Tony Blair will stand down at the end of June, making way for Gordon Brown. I vividly remember the night of his first victorious election in 1997. [...]