THE PERILS OF HILLARY As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton finds herself dealing with foreign upheaval not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union. It was four a.m. when Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, and by midmorning she was in the Oval Office conferring with…

Credit Illustration by TOM BACHTELL The weather on the morning of Sunday, May 1st, was a springtime glory: crisp, sunny, infinite blue skies––the sort of conditions that pilots call “severe clear.” Such a morning comes along so infrequently that, especially if you were walking along Vesey or Church…

David Simon would be happy to find out that The Wire was hyperbolic and ridiculous, and that the “American Century” is still to come. But he’s not betting on it. An excerpt from Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues , forthcoming from The New Press. Photograph by Robin Holland Watching…

Kenji Aoki for The New York Times On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers…

They marched southward from Ramallah one windy morning in March 2012. Sheikh Nasser a-Din al-Masri led them--a slim man with a short black beard that half-hid a puckered scar on his neck. They filled the road to Jerusalem, a long procession of men, women, and children wearing white robes to show…

‘Damn right,’ I said Eliot Weinberger Buy Decision Points by George W. Bush Virgin, 497 pp, £25.00, November 2010, ISBN 978 0 7535 3966 8 In the late 1960s, George Bush Jr was at Yale, branding the asses of pledges to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity with a hot coathanger. Michel Foucault was at…

We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work…

Chris Hondros/Getty Images Protesters gather on the front line between anti- and pro-Mubarak factions on the edge of Tahrir Square as an Egyptian Army tank stands by, Cairo, February 3, 2011 On Tuesday, February 1, we headed to Tahrir Square for the “million man” march with some apprehension. After…

News & Culture Matt Latimer worked as one of Dubya’s speechwriters during the president’s final twenty-two months in office. He was there to help sell the surge to a skeptical public. He was there as we pretended that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. And he was there to see a president…

One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in…

Robert Jordan, born James Oliver Rigney Jr. in 1948, sold more than 40 million books in his lifetime. His Wheel of Time series, a still-unfinished multivolume epic spanning, at last count, thirteen books, more than 10,500 pages, and approximately 3,734,312 words, is among the world’s most popular…

It’s a postcard October morning at Kentucky’s Carter Caves state park. Sycamore and hickory have already turned orange, and the sun crests ancient Appalachian slopes against a cloudless sky. With Halloween a few days away, a life-sized Elvis dummy peeks out a visitor center window. Middle schoolers…

The Tumen River serves as part of the border between China and North Korea, with the Chinese city of Tumen on the left and the North Korean town of Namyang on the right. The railway bridge in the foreground is a major route for transporting Chinese aid and goods to North Korea. Du Bin for The New…

The Gangster Prince of Liberia [Details] How a twentysomething small-time hoodlum from Florida may have become the most notorious murderer in Africa By Adam Higginbotham Details November 2007 It was dark out early that night, and clear. But for the deputies of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office who…

Old Victorian printing letters for a letterpress. Photograph: Steven Heald/Alamy O n 25 September 2007, a woman named Vicki Walker committed a type crime so calamitous that it cost her not only her job, but almost her sanity. Walker was working as an accountant in a New Zealand health agency, and…

This American Life Ira Glass, host of the public radio show This American Life , at the Brown Theatre, Louisville, Kentucky, January 2006 Radio receives little critical attention. Of the various methods for communicating ideas and emotions—books, newspapers, visual art, music, film, television, the…