Features

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software By Steven Johnson. Scribner, 288 pages, $25.00 It’s easy to see why there aren’t more books like Steven Johnson’s Emergence: Only Johnson knows how to write them. Johnson was a founder and editor of Feed, one of the Web’s first and best “zines” (now moribund, […]

When Tony Blair went on television within hours of the September 11 terrorist attacks to declare that Britain would stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States, the British prime minister entered a moment of total personal and political clarity–an epiphany. He would give George W. Bush and the war on terrorism unflinching support and […]

How the United States sowed the whirlwind

After September 11, it wasn’t long before martial terminology returned to the airwaves: There was talk once again of blitzes and bombs, of aerial assaults and ground attacks, of going on the offensive and making moves to shore up the defense at home. There was talk of heroes and warriors, of duty and sacrifice, of […]

Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War By Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad. Simon and Schuster, 382 pages, $27.00 A day after the September 11 attack on the United States, a man who had escaped the collapsed World Trade Center declared: “We are all Israelis now.” He was, of course, […]

President Nixon: Alone in the White House By Richard Reeves. Simon and Schuster, 672 pages, $28.00 No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam By Larry Berman. Free Press, 334 pages, $27.50 Liberals may wish it weren’t so, but the last president not to give a let’s-rein-in-big-government State of the Union address was […]

“Give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now.” –Red Hot Chili Peppers The September 11 attack produced plenty of collateral damage, but one largely unnoticed casualty is the impending harm to the nonprofit sector. The 1990s were boom years for the sector, in no small part because the value of […]

It would be interesting, wouldn’t it, to watch oneself watching TV, to see the muddy mirror that the face offers the screen, the weird and slavish half-reactions flickering across it, the shadows of infant anxiety and sudden, twitchy brightenings–like a dreamer with his eyes open. I’d like to have had a camera trained on my […]