George Packer is still worth your time.

And now, his latest work is out from behind the paywall.

Packer:

Unlike Johnson, Obama wanted a serious internal debate about his policy, and he got one, with advisers considering whether the war was already lost. Yet the conclusion was, in a sense, foreordained by the President's campaign promises. Intellectual honesty in the private councils of the White House told you something about the calibre of the officials involved, but in the realm of public policy it made little difference.

Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster. But if he considers success unlikely, or even questions the premise of the war, he has kept it to himself.

Shane McAdams:

If we abstain from real judgment someone will fill the void with an alternative judgment, one that only appears to be critical, but is actually defensive.

Ridley Scott:

How close is cynicism to the truth?

They're almost on the same side of the line. Cynicism will lead you to the truth. Or vice versa.

Ezra Klein:

The implicit assumption of these arguments about strategy is that there is, somewhere out there, a workable strategy. That there is some way to navigate our political system such that you enact wise legislation solving pressing problems. But that's an increasingly uncertain assumption, I think.

Imagine a group of men sitting in a dim prison cell. One of the walls has a window. Beyond that wall, they know they'll find freedom. One of the men spends years picking away at it with a small knife. The others eventually tire of him. That's an idiotic approach, they say. You need more force. So one of the other men spends his days ramming the bed frame into the wall. Eventually, he exhausts himself. The others mock his hubris. Another tries to light the wall afire. That fails as well. The assembled prisoners laugh at the attempt. And so it goes. But the problem is that there is no answer to their dilemma. The problem is not their strategy. It's the wall.

Cormac McCarthy:

At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

The Last Mission

Caterina Fake:

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be.

John Maynard Keynes:

We have reached the third degree, where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

Paul Graham:

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get.

Richard Holbrooke:

In Washington smart men tend to put down people whom they regard as less smart with little regard for the substance of those people's views. The way the government works, speed gets rewarded more than deliberation, brilliance more than depth.

Only with hindsight can one look back and see that the smartest course may not have been the right one.

Bridget Riley:

For me, drawing is an inquiry, a way of finding out -- the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance -- with the unknown -- is my chosen and particular task, and provided I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do.

The strange thing is that the information I am looking for is, of course, there all the time and as present to one's naked eye, so to speak, as it ever will be. But to get the essentials down there on my sheet of paper so that I can recover and see again what I have just seen, that is what I have to push towards. What it amounts to is that while drawing I am watching and simultaneously recording myself looking, discovering things that on the one hand are staring me in the face and on the other I have not yet really seen. It is this effort 'to clarify' that makes drawing particularly useful and it is in this way that I assimilate experience and find new ground.

Dan Soltzberg:

It is ironic: people don't notice that noticing is important!

Malcom Gladwell:

Effective teachers have a gift for noticing -- what one researcher calls "withitness." It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness.

George Packer is worth your time.

Richard Holbrooke, writing on behalf of Nicholas Katzenbach, in 1967:

Hanoi uses time the way the Russians used terrain before Napoleon's advance on Moscow, always retreating, losing every battle, but eventually creating conditions in which the enemy can no longer function. For Napoleon it was his long supply lines and the cold Russian winter; Hanoi hopes that for us it will be the mounting dissension, impatience, and frustration caused by a protracted war without fronts or other visible signs success; a growing need to choose between guns and butter; and an increasing American repugnance at finding, for the first time, their own country cast as "the heavy."

Packer:

Unlike Johnson, Obama wanted a serious internal debate about his policy, and he got one, with advisers considering whether the war was already lost. Yet the conclusion was, in a sense, foreordained by the President's campaign promises. Intellectual honesty in the private councils of the White House told you something about the calibre of the officials involved, but in the realm of public policy it made little difference.

He concludes:

Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster. But if he considers success unlikely, or even questions the premise of the war, he has kept it to himself.

Rory Stewart:

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble.

Ahmed Rashid:

Democratic politicians are demanding results before next year's congressional elections, which is neither realistic nor possible. Moreover, the Taliban are quite aware of the Democrats' timetable.

Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Mason, Waters, Wright, and Gilmour:

And you run and run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Lisa Moore, in the October issue of The Walrus:

Here's what happens when you turn forty-five. You realize you will only ever read so many books -- how much time have you got left for reading? -- and you had better only read the good ones. There are only so many movies, so many trips, so many new friends, so many family barbecues with the sun going down over the long grass. It has always been this way. Finite. But at forty-five you realize it.

The Last Mission

Pink Floyd:

Ticking away the moments that make up the dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find that ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or a half page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

Time

Ahmed Rashid:

Richard Holbrooke recently told me that Pakistan's cooperation in fighting the Pakistani Taliban was very welcome, but that the Pakistani army now has to go into South Waziristan ... The US military is providing limited fresh equipment and funds to the army for just such an operation.

Obama has attempted to make his Afghan anti-narcotics policy more effective and to involve neighboring countries in a regional settlement. It's an assertive and possibly productive new strategy, but the Obama administration has had neither the time nor the resources to implement it.

In private moments Holbrooke has regretted how the Afghan elections have distracted attention from putting into effect Obama's new strategy. At home Obama has not had the time to show that his policy is the right one to follow, and now the elections themselves are being exposed as riddled with fraud.

For the first time, polling shows that a majority of Americans do not approve of Obama's handling of Afghanistan. Yet if it is to have any chance of success, the Obama plan for Afghanistan needs a serious long-term commitment -- at least for the next three years. Democratic politicians are demanding results before next year's congressional elections, which is neither realistic nor possible. Moreover, the Taliban are quite aware of the Democrats' timetable. With Obama's plan the US will be taking Afghanistan seriously for the first time since 2001; if it is to be successful it will need not only time but international and US support -- both open to question.

The Pakistani military will bide its time until the Americans are really desperate, and then the army will demand its price from the US -- a price to be measured in financial and military support.

The Taliban's game plan of waiting out the Americans now looks more plausible than ever.

Rory Stewart:

It is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban.

Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Graeme Wood:

"Is the boy a Talib?" I asked. "Future Talib," he said.

Elizabeth Rubin, from just before the election:

Karzai remains well ahead. What happens if he wins? "What will you do then?" I asked an American working for the Obama administration.

"The first step is to shift away from the weekly pat on the back he got from Bush but not be as removed as Obama was," he said. "Then if we can reduce his paranoia and if he has a renewed mandate and if we get the good Karzai, the charming Karzai. ..." It was ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Time

Michael Specter:

The planet is in danger, and nature needs help.

Craig Venter:

It should be possible to assemble any combination of synthetic and natural DNA segments in any desired order.

Specter on Venter's comment:

That may turn out to be one of the most understated asides in the history of science.

What sorts of risk does that bring into play, and what sorts of opportunity?

Decius:

I've always been a believer that the answer to bad speech is better speech.

Jay Keasling:

We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us.

From The World in 2009:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."

Tom Knight:

Biology is the nanotechnology that works.

Kent Campbell:

This is not theoretical. This is real.

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

Freeman Dyson:

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

In the post-Darwinian era, biotechnology will be domesticated. There will be biotech games for children, played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen.

From the pen of Natalie Dee:

Real Egg 1: What is going to happen to us when our chickens come out?

Real Egg 2: I don't know, man. I don't know.

Drew Endy:

My guess is that our ultimate solution to the crisis of health-care costs will be to redesign ourselves so that we don't have so many problems to deal with.

Jeff Goldblum, in Jurassic Park:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Drew Endy:

We are surfing an exponential now, and, even for people who pay attention, surfing an exponential is a really tricky thing to do. And when the exponential you are surfing has the capacity to impact the world in such a fundamental way, in ways we have never before considered, how do you even talk about that?

Julian Schnabel:

Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.

A Life Of Its Own

Recently, Decius wrote:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

We need good, publicly funded, refereed voter guides that provide balanced information about the issues, and we need to promote a culture that advocates that people evaluate the information in these guides objectively and without regard to partisan bias.

Previously, he wrote:

News media election guides often present editorial endorsements alongside or interspersed with raw election information. Editorial endorsements are an important exercise of our First Amendment rights. However, when voters are getting all of their information from an opinionated source it is harder for them to view the information objectively and make their own choices.

And long before that, he wrote:

Everyone participates in the process of producing the truth every day. Your recommendations matter. You will need to be able to think critically about the range of ideas that you are exposed to and decide which ones make sense.

It is that last part that will really move us forward.

In the October issue of Atlantic Monthly, Mark Bowden writes:

With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward to provide the "reporting" that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition.

I would describe their approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger's role is to help his side.

Without journalism, the public good is viewed only through a partisan lens, and politics becomes blood sport.

Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful precisely because it does not seek power. It seeks truth. Those who forsake it to shill for a product or a candidate or a party or an ideology diminish their own power. They are missing the most joyful part of the job.

Louis Menand:

Facts never speak for themselves. We speak for them.

On Jon Stewart against Tucker Carlson:

Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were "hurting America."

Recall:

STEWART: Here's just what I wanted to tell you guys.

CARLSON: Yes.

STEWART: Stop.

[LAUGHTER]

STEWART: Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.

BEGALA: OK. Now

[CROSSTALK]

STEWART: And come work for us, because we, as the people...... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

The Story Behind the Story

Garry Wills:

The momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed.

Some were dismayed to see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the unaccountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that turning around the huge secret empire built by the National Security State is a hard, perhaps impossible, task. A new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry.

Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

Rebecca Solnit:

Some of the worst crimes in the American landscape are hiding in plain sight.

Jules Winnfield:

The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd.

Thomas Powers, in May 2005:

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

Entangled Giant

Kevin Whitelaw:

Users have been flocking to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, where they voluntarily share all kinds of details about their lives.

Jonathan Franzen:

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It's about sparing me from the intrusion of other people's personal lives.

Matt Zimmerman:

Everyone, if they are posting information online, unless they are taking very specific technological measures to prevent disclosures, should assume that that information is going to be able to be obtained through the legal process.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Andrew Keen:

In the future, I think there will be pockets of outrageously irresponsible, anonymous people ... but for the most part, we will have cleansed ourselves of the anonymous.

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

It's the collapse of inconvenience. It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't realize it.

Gotcha! Why Online Anonymity May Be Fading

Whit Diffie and Susan Landau:

It is a long way from putting clips on wires to having government standards for electronic eavesdropping. How did this come about? Does wiretapping actually make us more secure?

In 2007, Congress legalized warrantless wiretapping; in 2008, it went a long step further, not only legalizing new wiretapping practices but also giving retroactive immunity to telephone companies that had colluded with the government in performing warrantless electronic eavesdropping.

We are moving from a world with a billion people connected to the Internet to one in which 10 or 100 times that many devices will be connected as well. Particularly in aggregation, the information reported by these devices will blanket the world with a network whose gaze is difficult to evade.

The end of the rainbow would be the ability to store all traffic, then decide later which messages were worthy of further study.

Bellovin, Blaze, Diffie, Landau, Neumann, and Rexford:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

A.O. Scott:

"The Lives of Others" illuminates ... the moral no man's land where base impulses and high principles converge.

Anthony Lane:

You might think that "The Lives of Others" is aimed solely at modern Germans. A movie this strong, however, is never parochial, nor is it period drama. Es ist fuer uns. It's for us.

Louis Menand:

People are prurient, and they like to lap up the gossip. People also enjoy judging other people's lives. They enjoy it excessively. It's not one of the species' more attractive addictions ...

Communications Surveillance: Privacy and Security at Risk