As I was driving from Jericho to Ramallah, in the occu­pied West Bank, in early March, I noticed a large sign that Palestinians had set up in prepa­ra­tion for Land Day, on the thir­tieth of the month. The sign showed the now ubiq­ui­tous Banksy print of a protester, with his nose and mouth cov­ered, hurtling a bou­quet of flow­er­s—pre­sum­ably in place of a Molotov cock­tail—at an invis­ible oppressor. The drawing had been printed under one of the best-known lines by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:
On this Land, there is what makes life worth living.

In 2011, when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was arrested in a Manhattan hotel on rape charges, Lénaïg Bredoux, a Paris-based reporter, watched the reporting in dismay. At the time, the French media largely devoted itself to crit­i­cizing the American judi­cial system instead of inves­ti­gating alle­ga­tions that had dogged Strauss-Kahn for years. Moved to action, she con­tacted the French jour­nalist Tristane Banon, who, in 2007, pub­licly accused him of sex­u­ally assaulting her in 2003 and that is how Bredoux uncov­ered a cul­ture of silence inside the French Socialist Party.

The most orig­inal rev­e­la­tion of the cur­rent wave of author­i­tar­ians is that the con­struc­tion of overtly antidemo­cratic dic­ta­tor­ships aspiring to total­i­tar­i­anism is unnec­es­sary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt des­ig­na­tion of this new author­i­tar­i­anism is the insid­ious term “il­lib­eral democ­racy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary

The NSA has said it only searched its vast database of our calling records when it had rea­son­able sus­pi­cion that a phone number was con­nected to ter­rorism. But it did not have to demon­strate the basis for this sus­pi­cion to a judge. Moreover, it was autho­rized to col­lect data on all callers one, two, or three steps removed from the sus­pect num­ber—an authority that can quickly gen­erate more than one mil­lion phone num­bers of inno­cent Americans from a single sus­pect source number. (...)

The Digital Public Library of America, to be launched on April 18, is a pro­ject to make the hold­ings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums avail­able to all Americans—and even­tu­ally to everyone in the world—online and free of charge. How is that pos­sible? In order to answer that ques­tion, I would like to describe the first steps and imme­diate future of the DPLA. But before going into detail, I think it impor­tant to stand back and take a broad view of how such an ambi­tious under­taking fits into the devel­op­ment of what we com­monly call an infor­ma­tion society. (...)

Darkness descends upon the Arab world. Waste, death, and destruc­tion attend a fight for a better life. Outsiders com­pete for influ­ence and settle accounts. The peaceful demon­stra­tions with which this began, the lofty values that inspired them, become dis­tant mem­o­ries. Elections are fes­tive occa­sions where polit­ical visions are an afterthought. The only con­sis­tent pro­gram is reli­gious and is stirred by the past. A scramble for power is unleashed, without clear rules, values, or end­point. It will not stop with regime change or sur­vival. History does not move for­ward. It slips side­ways.(...)

Sunday’s New York Times reported that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has pro­duced a fifty-page legal memo that pur­port­edly autho­rized President Obama to order the killing of US cit­izen, Anwar al-Awlaki, without a trial. Last month, the US car­ried out that order with a drone strike in Yemen that killed al-Awlaki and another US cit­izen trav­eling with him. The strike was front-page news, and appar­ently was under­taken with the approval of Yemen author­i­ties, yet as it was a “covert oper­a­tion,” the Obama admin­is­tra­tion has declined even to acknowl­edge that it ordered the killing. (...)

On Friday, a front-page New York Times story reported that a rift has emerged within the Obama Administration over whether it has authority to kill “rank-and-file” Islamist mil­i­tants in for­eign coun­tries in which there is not an inter­na­tion­ally rec­og­nized “armed con­flict.” The impli­ca­tions of this debate are not trivial: Imagine that Russia started killing indi­vid­uals living in the United States with remote-con­trolled drone mis­siles, and argued that it was jus­ti­fied in doing so because it had deter­mined, in secret, that they posed a threat to Russia’s secu­rity, and that the United States was unwilling to turn them over. Would we calmly pro­nounce such actions com­pliant with the rule of law? Not too likely. (...)

The ques­tion has come to haunt every article and broad­cast from Egypt, Tunisia and other coun­tries in the region whose people have revolted: what con­sti­tutes a rev­o­lu­tion? In the 1970s, we used to chase that ques­tion in courses on com­par­a­tive rev­o­lu­tions; and looking back on my ancient lec­ture notes, I can’t help but imagine a tra­jec­tory: England, 1640; France, 1789; Russia, 1917 … and Egypt, 2011?

Chinese author­i­ties have done what they can to block news of Egyptian people-power from spreading to China. Reports about Egypt in China’s state-run media have been brief and vac­uous. On February 6, at the height of the protests, the People’s Daily informed readers that “the Egyptian gov­ern­ment is con­tin­uing to carry out its var­ious mea­sures to sup­port restora­tion of social order.” But on the Chinese Internet, which despite vig­orous policing is hard to stifle, Mubarak has received a drub­bing: “auto­crat,” “cor­rupt thug,” and so on. Thus, while Chinese cen­sors have declared the word Mubarak (along with “Egypt” and others) to be “sen­si­tive” and have set up fil­ters to delete any mes­sage that con­tains it, Chinese Web users, in their usual cat-and-mouse game, have invented witty sub­sti­tutes. These include “Mu Xiaoping” and “Mu Jintao”—which, by playing on the names of China’s own auto­crats, get around the cen­sors and up the ante at the same time.

Set in post–September 11 Baltimore, the HBO series The Wire—whose sixty episodes were orig­i­nally broad­cast between June 2002 and March 2008 and are now avail­able on DVD—has many things on its rich and roaming mind, but one of those things is Baltimore itself, home of Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken, Babe Ruth, and Billie Holiday. Baltimore is not just a stand-in for Western civ­i­liza­tion or glob­al­ized urban rot or the American inner city now given the cold fed­eral shoulder in the folly-filled war on terror, though it is cer­tainly all these things. Baltimore is also just plain itself, with a very specific cast of char­ac­ters, dead and alive.

Now Simon, along with his col­lab­o­rator Eric Overmyer, has turned his atten­tion to New Orleans. Over the summer the ini­tial ten-episode season of Treme, his new HBO series, ended. A second season will begin next spring. At first blush Treme would seem to be quite sim­ilar to The Wire: a syn­optic por­trait of a poor, old, trou­bled, black-majority American city, expressed through the inter­twined unfolding sto­ries of a group of char­ac­ters. But there are sev­eral impor­tant dif­fer­ences—the most obvious of which is that The Wire pre­sents Baltimore as the object of slow-motion dev­as­ta­tion, in the form of a couple of gen­er­a­tions’ worth of changes in urban eco­nomics, race rela­tions, gov­er­nance, and geog­raphy, whereas Treme pre­sents New Orleans as having been dev­as­tated much more dra­mat­i­cally and rapidly, by Hurricane Katrina, which struck on August 29, 2005.

The poet Paul Celan said of his native Czernowitz that it was a place where people and books used to live. Tony Judt was a man for whom books lived, as well as people. His mind, like his apart­ment on Washington Square, was full of books—and they walked with him, arguing, to the very end.

And George Orwell? It would sur­prise, and doubtless irri­tate, him to dis­cover that since his death in 1950 he has moved impla­cably toward NT status. He is inter­pretable, mal­leable, ambas­sado­rial, and patri­otic. He denounced the Empire, which pleases the left; he denounced com­mu­nism, which pleases the right. He warned us against the cor­rupting effect on pol­i­tics and public life of the misuse of lan­guage, which pleases almost everyone. He said that “good prose is like a window pane,” which pleases those who, despite living in the land of Shakespeare and Dickens, mistrust “fancy” writing. He dis­trusted anyone who was too “clever.” (This is a key English sus­pi­cion, most famously voiced in 1961 when Lord Salisbury, a stal­wart of the impe­ri­alist Tory right, denounced Iain Macleod, sec­re­tary of state for the colonies and member of the new reforming Tory left, as “too clever by half.”) (...)

How can we nav­i­gate through the infor­ma­tion land­scape that is only begin­ning to come into view? The ques­tion is more urgent than ever fol­lowing the recent set­tle­ment between Google and the authors and pub­lishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copy­right. For the last four years, Google has been dig­i­tizing mil­lions of books, including many cov­ered by copy­right, from the col­lec­tions of major research libraries, and making the texts search­able online. The authors and pub­lishers objected that dig­i­tizing con­sti­tuted a vio­la­tion of their copy­rights. After lengthy nego­ti­a­tions, the plain­tiffs and Google agreed on a set­tle­ment, which will have a pro­found effect on the way books reach readers for the fore­see­able future. What will that future be? (...)

Recently Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking into finan­cial ties between the phar­ma­ceu­tical industry and the aca­demic physi­cians who largely deter­mine the market value of pre­scrip­tion drugs. He hasn’t had to look very hard.
Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, pro­fessor of psy­chi­atry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pedi­atric psy­chophar­ma­cology at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, chil­dren as young as two years old are now being diag­nosed with bipolar dis­order and treated with a cock­tail of pow­erful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that pur­pose and none of which were approved for chil­dren below ten years of age. (...)

David Levering Lewis’s rich and engaging God’s Crucible shows that it took two things to make Europeans think of them­selves as a people. One was the cre­ation of a vast Holy Roman Empire by the six-foot-four, thick-necked, fair-haired Frankish war­rior king we know as Charlemagne. The other was the devel­op­ment, in the Iberian penin­sula on the south­western bor­ders of his dominion, of the Muslim cul­ture of Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus. In the pro­cess that made the var­ious tribes of Europe into a single people, what those tribes had in common and what dis­tin­guished them from their Muslim neigh­bors were both impor­tant. (...)

In the months leading up to the Iraq war, when most news orga­ni­za­tions were duti­fully relaying the Bush admin­is­tra­tion’s claims about the threat posed by Iraq, Knight Ridder/McClatchy ran sev­eral sto­ries ques­tioning their accu­racy. Since the inva­sion, the com­pany has run a lean but resourceful oper­a­tion in Baghdad. All three of its bureau chiefs have been young Arab-American women with some flu­ency in Arabic. At home in the cul­tures of both the West and the Middle East, they have been adept at inter­preting each to the other. (...)

Imam Khomeini International in Tehran looks much like any big new air­port, except that its long cor­ri­dors bear posters declaring this the Year of National Unity and Islamic Solidarity, rather than ads for lip­stick and per­fume. Still, it does not take long for an American pass­port-holder to meet with deeper dif­fer­ences.
The immi­gra­tion offi­cers are polite, a little embar­rassed, even, as they recall that you will have to be fin­ger­printed. (...)

If we are to pre­vail against the tac­tics of terror, we need struc­tural reforms to ensure clear rules, aggres­sive con­gres­sional over­sight, and polit­ical leaders who are willing to stand up for prin­ciple in the face of over­whelming pop­ular pres­sure. Following September 11, we had none of these. We need to restore them all if we are to make pro­gress in reestab­lishing the system of checks and bal­ances that Bush, Ashcroft, and Gonzales so aggres­sively sought to dis­mantle in the name of our pro­tec­tion. (...)

Among the many jar­ring sights I have wit­nessed as a reporter writing about poverty, one of the sad­dest involved a father, a son, and a max­imum secu­rity prison out­side Joliet, Illinois. The son, a vol­uble thir­teen-year-old named Dwayne, wasn’t a bad kid but had become increas­ingly trou­ble­some in class. His father had been locked up since Dwayne was five, but still had influ­ence with the three chil­dren he had left behind. Or so their mother hoped. Alarmed at her dif­fi­cul­ties con­trol­ling the family, she looked to the sound of a father’s voice to set things straight. It was a two-hun­dred-mile round trip from their home in Milwaukee, and I had the only car. (...)

wenty-four chro­mogenic prints each mea­suring three by five feet: the exhi­bi­tion begins with six of them in the Metropolitan’s Tisch Galleries, the long upstairs cor­ridor cus­tom­arily devoted to etch­ings, draw­ings, and pho­tographs, and con­tinues, after two left turns, in the modest spaces of the Howard Gilman Gallery. The show con­cerns the after­math of Hurricane Katrina’s ruinous pass over New Orleans on August 29, 2005, as recorded by the dis­tin­guished archi­tec­tural pho­tog­ra­pher Robert Polidori in four visits between September 2005 and April 2006; it is being attended, to judge from the day this viewer was pre­sent, by more youthful African-Americans than usu­ally make their way into the Met. (...)

Israel’s General Shlomo Brom, who until recently served as deputy national secu­rity adviser for strategic plan­ning in the IDF, has warned that if the failure of Hamas’s gov­ern­ment is brought about by an Israeli policy to iso­late Hamas and bring about its down­fall, the failure and the hard­ships suf­fered by the Palestinian pop­u­la­tion will not be attributed to Hamas but to Israel and the West. This is likely to widen the rift between the US, the Palestinians, and the Islamic world. On the other hand, an Israeli and Western policy of engage­ment and nego­ti­a­tion with Hamas could encourage fun­da­mental changes in Hamas’s poli­cies, and even­tu­ally in its ide­ology. (...)

“Now I realise for the first time,” wrote William Faulkner to a woman friend, looking back from the van­tage point of his mid-fifties, “what an amazing gift I had: une­d­u­cated in every formal sense, without even very lit­erate, let alone lit­erary, com­pan­ions, yet to have made the things I made. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why God or gods or who­ever it was, selected me to be the vessel.”
The dis­be­lief Faulkner lays claim to is a little disin­gen­uous. For the kind of writer he wanted to be, he had all the edu­ca­tion, even all the book-learning, he needed. (...)

North Korea is the most secre­tive country in the world today, with its main railway lined with walls so high that its for­eign pas­sen­gers can’t see the coun­tryside. It is also, as Brad-ley Martin’s book makes clear, the most repres­sive and brutal country in the world, with entire fam­i­lies some­times exe­cuted if one member gets drunk and slights the Dear Leader. It is at the same time by far the most total­i­tarian, with nearly every home equipped with a speaker that issues pro­pa­ganda from morning to night. It is the country most defiant of the West, whose leaders not only coun­ter­feit US $100 bills but also are building nuclear war­heads. North Korea is also, along with Iraq, the country where President Bush has most seri­ously bun­gled US for­eign policy, and has made the world more dan­gerous and unstable. Finally, North Korea is per­haps the least under­stood place on earth. There is no firm agree­ment on such basic facts as whether Kim Jong Il is a playboy or a savvy leader who con­stantly mon­i­tors the Internet and CNN. (...)

Driving north from Tampa on Florida’s Route 75 on November 1, as the battle over who would hold polit­ical power in America was reaching a climax but the struggle over what that battle meant had yet to begin, I put down the top of my rented green con­vert­ible, turned the talk radio voices up to blaring, and com­menced reading the road­side. Beside me bill­boards flew past, one hard upon another, as if some errant giant had cut a great deck of cards and fanned them out along each shoulder. Hour by hour, as the booming salesman’s voice of proud Floridian Rush Limbaugh rum­bled from the radio, warning gravely of the dan­gers of “voting for bin Laden” ("Haven’t you noticed that bin Laden is using Democratic talking points?"), and (...)

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A promi­nent Shiite cleric, shrewd militia leader, and polit­ical strate­gist, Nasrallah is admired throughout the Arab world for leading a cam­paign of resis­tance to Israel’s occu­pa­tion of southern Lebanon, which ended in May 2000, and for his suc­cessful deal­ings with the Israeli gov­ern­ment. Most recently, after three years of on-and-off nego­ti­a­tions through a German medi­ator, Nasrallah per­suaded Ariel Sharon to hand over 429 pris­oners, as well as the bodies of fifty-nine Hezbollah fighters killed in combat, in exchange for freeing an Israeli busi­nessman kid­napped by Hezbollah and returning the remains of three Israeli sol­diers killed in Lebanon. The deal sparked a day of national cel­e­bra­tion in Lebanon, and has been seen by some as a vin­di­ca­tion of Hezbollah’s use of vio­lence for polit­ical leverage.

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