From The New Yorker, Seymour M. Hersh on Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran. The first chapter from Nuclear Deterrence Theory: The Search for Credibility by Robert Powell. The first chapter from Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age by Alasdair Roberts. From The American Scholar, William Deresiewicz on the disadvantages of an elite education; an essay on the end of the Black American Narrative; film and theater critic Steve Vineberg reflects on the art of surprise; and Jean Bethke Elshtain reviews Reappraisals by Tony Judt (and more). And God Said, "Just Do It": Churches are urging spouses to have hot sex — and lots of it. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Orgy: An article on sexual hypocrisy and the Internet. From Prospect, an interview with Nicholas Stern on global warming; and Mark Hannam, Jonathan Ford, John Gieve, Anatole Kaletsky, George Soros and Martin Wolf debate how to stop the next bubble. Andrew Roberts on why history will say that we misunderestimated George W Bush. The death of life writing: Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses — whatever happened to the golden age of biography? A review of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Agora: Ancient Greek and Roman Humour by R. Drew Griffith and Robert B. Marks.
