A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack
Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. It is now a year since the Democratic National Committee’s mail system was compromised—a year since events in…
Journal Entry
Honorable actions. NORFOLK, CONN., 12 JULY—When I am made aware of people and the things they do such as the following, there is always some humiliation in it. I will be brief. I ought to have posted this days ago…
The Unacknowledged Logic of North Korea’s Missile Tests
We may not like it, but nuclear weapons may be all that stands in the way of another US-conducted “regime change.” Given that North Korea flooded the airwaves and the press during our July 4 rituals—which grow more objectionably militarist…
Journal Entry
NORFOLK, CONN., June 26—We cannot read even our best correspondents and writers anymore should they dare to assume a perspective that deviates even minorly from the orthodoxy. In consequence, one gets into pointless discussions, maybe tipping toward argument, with perfectly…
Journal Entry
VAGLIAGLI, NEAR SIENA, June 10—By the grace and generosity of someone very dear, I finish a couple of weeks in Italy today, most of its spent in a stone farmhouse on a vineyard in this little commune between Siena and Florence….
On Writers, the Media, and the Corruptions of Power
Joel Whitney, whose book Finks is about the CIA’s subversion of US culture, talks about the scars left by the Cold War. In Part 1 of my exchange with Joel Whitney, conducted shortly after OR Books published Finks: How the CIA Tricked the…
How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers
Joel Whitney talks about his book Finks, which exposes the agency’s corruption of American culture during the Cold War. “The past is a foreign country,” L.P. Hartley famously wrote as he opened The Go–Between. There is a pretty tristesse in…
Journal Entry
Something for Memorial Day. NEW YORK, 29 MAY—This past week, in anticipation of a couple of weeks’ travel, I finished work on the transcript of an excellent interview I conducted early in the spring. Readers of my column will know…
Journal Entry
Tipping Over. NORFOLK, CONN., 17 MAY—To begin, a couple of quotations. No. 1: “We are seeing in the U.S. a developing schizophrenia. There is no other way I can explain the accusations against the acting [sitting] U.S. president that he…
How China Is Building the Post-Western World
Beijing’s Belt and Road project may be the largest single infrastructure program in human history. Not infrequently, I bang on in this space and elsewhere about “parity between West and non-West.” I consider achieving this the single most pressing necessity…
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