Dexter Filkins has a powerful article describing Iraq as it is now, and the ways in which he can no longer recognize the country where he has lived for most of the past five years. "When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock," he recalls. "To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant."