Arthur Holland Michel
When Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez opened fire on two US military centers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in July, killing four Marines and a Navy sailor, he was acting, at least in part, at the suggestion of a man who had been dead for four years. Among Abdulazeez’s possessions, investigators reportedly found various CDs of sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki, a bookish, US-born al-Qaeda cleric who spread a vernacular, and thus deeply effective and reproducible, call for global jihad. Though Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011, never committed an act of terrorism himself, his name has come up 
One of the many unnamed intelligence officials quoted in Chris Woods’s Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars declares that the drone is “the most precise weapon in the history of warfare.” It is a claim that’s repeated throughout the book. For General David Deptula, who oversaw the Air Force drone program in its early years, this aerial tool represents a radical departure from “the industrial age of warfare,” when pilots would simply drop thousands of unguided tons of ordinance in the general direction of their targets. Drones, which can loiter over a target for days, if not weeks, are capable 
This summer, I had ophthalmic shingles. For a month, pain and I walked, as one nineteenth-century pain-sufferer put it, arm in arm. At the end of this cruel and unfair partnership, I still did not understand my companion, much as I wanted to. So when I heard about Joanna Bourke’s The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers, an accomplished account of our strange and often contradictory attempts to comprehend, communicate, and relieve pain, I had my next read set for me. 
In 1999, Richard A. Clarke, the US Counterterrorism Czar for Clinton and Bush, wanted to attach Hellfire missiles to unarmed Predator drones so that he could kill Osama bin Laden. In the months before September 11, Predators set their cameras upon the al Qaeda leader several times, but Tomahawk cruise missiles—then the only option for unmanned strikes—took hours to reach Afghanistan from the launch submarines off the coast of Pakistan. After the attacks, lethal drones were an easy sell. Thirteen years and four-hundred covert drone strikes later, Clarke has written a thriller about the program for which he admits 
Very unlikely things happen all the time. In New York, a city of eight million inhabitants, you frequently run into people you know—quite often, it’s the people you least want to run into. Sometimes, poker players get dealt a Royal Flush (the chance of that happening is roughly 1 in 650,000). You’ve probably had the experience of opening a book to the page you were looking for, as I did twice while preparing this review. Less fortunate souls get struck by lightning (1 in 300,000). The creation of life itself was an event so unlikely that it would seem impossible—and 
Peter W. Singer Peter W. Singer’s previous books introduced the public to an unfamiliar world of privatized armies, child soldiers, and frightening robotic military machines. His latest offering, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press), coauthored by cybersecurity specialist Allan Friedman, doesn’t take us to some distant, hypothetical battlefield, but rather into our own computers, to the dark—and, at times, bizarre—cyberworld that he calls “a place of risk and danger.” Singer, who is a Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution and the Director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, points out that while 
Until recently, many people—even the Nobel Peace Prize Committee—trusted Barack Obama. And even if they didn’t trust the person in the Oval Office, the American civic tradition tells them to find solace in the genius of the U.S. system of government, with its carefully calibrated array of checks and balances designed to prevent presidents from doing anything too terrible.