The intrepid war reporter Robert Fisk of The Independent in London brings passion and wit to his work and an unsually lively and ironic historical memory. On his wall at home in Beirut, where I caught him in conversation today, are the words of the British Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maud taking Baghdad during […]
Alexander Pope’s couplet gives me goosebumps: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said: Let Newton be! and all was light.” James Gleick’s lean, lovely biography is a modern account of Newton’s multiple breakthroughs–and then some. Almost everything we know about apples and moons in motion and at rest, about time, space, […]
Here‘s what you might have seen and heard in Manchester, New Hampshire on Wednesday evening if you’d drifted onto the presidential campaign trail with Dave Winer and me. I pass it along in three long sound bites, with a minimum of filtration by me. It was chance that the hot house-party on our first day on […]
Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee made a lot of points I hadn’t heard before in a conversation this afternoon on the matter of who “sexed up” the story last autumn and winter of Saddam Hussein’s 45-minute trigger on world-threatening weaponry. Andrew Gilligan of the BBC has famously charged Tony Blair & Company with hyping the not-so-brainy intelligence on […]
Listen up. The Real Live Preacher is my kind of searcher. He’s a minister in South Texas who started a blog as a sort of personal refuge from his church–a confessional place where he could voice some of the doubt and confusion in his life, or so he thought. He began, as he says, “on a […]
Listen up: The Daily Kos may be the rising blog among the underdog Democrats in the 2004 campaign–the Instapundit on the left side of the political blogosphere. But it is more than a forum of partisan comments and links. “The Daily Kos is a budding movement,” says the man behind the curtain: Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. He […]
Julie Powell had calves brains on the stove and cucumbers on the cutting board as she spoke about her blog, the Julie/Julie Project. Her dare to herself late last summer was to keep an open journal for one year as she cooked every recipe in Julia Childs’classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Thousands of readers are […]
“There was Slugger O’Toole who was drunk as a rule And fighting Bill Tracey from Dover And your man Mick McCann from the banks of the Bann Was the skipper of the Irish Rover… “ The question here is whether blogging is good for peace… in Sri Lanka? in Kashmir? in the Middle East? […]