Along with Jason Zengerle and Michael Crowley, I was one of the three original contributors to The Plank. None of us considered ourselves natural bloggers. All of us would have probably preferred to be spending our time reporting a 5,000-word feature story. But the world had changed—and, for all our trepidations, it looked like a good time, and it was, especially during the long 2008 election season. Eventually, the rest of the TNR staff joined us on the blog. And then, many of these writers acquired their own blogs. With the advent of the Stash, Spine, Treatment, Vine, and Avenue, the magazine’s whole blogging apparatus emerged as something wonderfully different than initially designed.  There was an unintended consequence to all this new blogging: To a large extent, the idea of a group blog ceased to make sense, what with the group so dispersed. So, we’ve decided to tenderly retire the Plank and complete the renovation of our website that began organically.

In the course of this renovation, we’re making several other changes. Denizens of the Plank will be shifting their time to producing more pieces—pieces grounded in reporting or extended argument or both, the essential qualities that we value so highly in print. Noam Scheiber, our master of political economy, will also be returning to longer-form writing. The Stash will join the Plank in the great blogosphere in the sky.

But don’t you mourn this loss. In The Plank’s stead, there’s a new blog on our roll. Jonathan Chait, our venerable TRB from Washington, is launching the digital version of his print column. You know him as a recreational pugilist, a master logician, a comic genius, and the worthy heir to the space once occupied by Michael Kinsley. He is a natural blogger and I’m sure you will find yourself unable to resist compulsively clicking on this url. I apologize in advance for Jon sucking away so much of your time.   

Lincoln Chafee has officially--finally--announced his candidacy for the governorship of Rhode Island. Last year, I spoke with him about his decision to leave the Republican Party in 2007 and become an Independent. He explained that he originally wanted to "energize a moribund party or start a new one"--and that he had pondered running for governor as a Green, a Libertarian, or even as a candidate of the Progressive Party:

I asked, is there a party out there that's got some roots in the ground? I looked at the Progressive Party from the 1920s. … The Greens were attractive to me. So often, you'd run into elected Greens from around the world. There's no other party that's got such an international scope. They're in Argentina, France, Germany. I thought it was intriguing. The Libertarians--their preference for keeping small government, I found attractive. Staying away from the social issues. Pro-choice. … The Progressive Party. I don't know much about it, but I like the name. It's got a forward motion to it, obviously. It's got some nice syllables that have some teeth to them. Progressive, progressive, forward moving.

But, Chafee said, his political backers convinced him to shelve his dream. "Ultimately, to be successful and raise money--my advisers and friends are saying here in Rhode Island that it's a tough state, and you don't want to be inviting questions that will require too much explaining," he said. "It's still a nagging thing. Angus King in Maine was elected governor as an Independent. He was well-liked and he did his two terms, but he left no legacy. You don't leave behind an apparatus. That's still in the back of my mind."

Click here to read Michael Crowley's profile of Chafee from 2005.

The Los Angeles Times ran an important story yesterday about the Obama administration's Nuclear Posture Review, which evaluates U.S. policy towards the use of nuclear weapons. Apparently there's a debate inside the administration--one that is splitting the civilians from the generals--not just about the size of our nuclear stockpile but also how we conceive of possible first-strike and retaliatory policies.

A core issue under debate, officials said, is whether the United States should shed its long-standing ambiguity about whether it would use nuclear weapons in certain circumstances, in hopes that greater specificity would give foreign governments more confidence to make their own decisions on nuclear arms.

Some in the U.S. argue that the administration should assure foreign governments that it won't use nuclear weapons in reaction to a biological, chemical or conventional attack, but only in a nuclear exchange. Others argue that the United States should promise that it would never use nuclear weapons first, but only in response to a nuclear attack.

As the story notes, some experts don't place much weight on how our publicly-stated doctrine emerges because they don't expect foreign nations to take it literally. And the reality is that any decisions about using nukes will certainly be case-by-case. But I'd still like to see some wider discussion of the underlying questions, which are among the most consequential that policymakers can consider. The questions are particularly vexing when it comes to terrorist groups and rogue states. Would we, for instance, actually nuke Pyongyang if it sold a weapon to terrorists who used it in America? That implied threat seems to exist, but I actually doubt that a President Obama--or any president, for that matter--would go through with it.

• Barack Obama, You Remind Me of Herbert Hoover, by John B. Judis
• THE TNR PROFILE: The Ukrainian Presidential Candidate Who Believes She’s Evita. Literally, Evita. by Julia Ioffe
• Why Does Campbell’s Soup Find Cap-and-Trade Mmm-Mmm Good? by Bradford Plumer
• How the Health Care Bill Could Make Doctors Richer AND Help the Poor, by Jonathan Cohn
• TNR’s Best of 2009: Peretz on Obama’s Cairo Speech, by Marty Peretz
• The Cult of Counterinsurgency, by Michael Crowley
• From the Archives: Intrigue Is Yemen’s National Motto
• Is There a Housing Recovery in Your Neighborhood?, by Alan Berube

As always, be sure to check out economic news on The Stash, environment and energy coverage on The Vine, the latest on health care at The Treatment, metro policy debate on The Avenue, and Marty Peretz's The Spine. Also be sure to take a look at TNR's new blogs by William Galston, Simon Johnson, Ed Kilgore, Damon Linker, and John McWhorter.

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What do you need to know about Yemen? The New Republic has been covering the country for years—from the civil war that made it what it is today to its current incarnation as a hotbed for Al Qaeda. Read below for some of our best pieces:

"Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula: A Primer," by Michelle Shephard (1/1/2010) What you need to know about the organization that gave us the Christmas bomber.  

"The Next Afghanistan?" by Bay Fang (5/6/2009) Pirates, Al Qaeda, unruly sheikhs. … Yemen has it all.

"Bad Fences," by John R. Bradley (3/1/2004) How Saudi Arabia and Yemen's fraught relationship threatens us all.

"Basket Catch," by Jonathan Schanzer (9/1/2003) How good an ally is Yemen's government?

"Aden and Abet," by the Editors (6/27/1994) Why we shouldn’t back Salih in Yemen's civil war—and why we should support South Yemen's independence.

"The Yemen Strategy," by Amos Perlmutter (7/5/1980) Why Saudi Arabia needs to get over its fear of a strong North Yemen.

"The War in Yemen," by Patrick Seale (1/1/1970) Why Nasser's armed intervention in Yemen is America's greatest diplomatic challenge since the Suez crisis.

The New Republic (TNR) is hiring for its 2010-2011 reporter-researcher program. Job duties include reporting, researching, writing, and fact-checking for TNR's print version and TNR Online; formatting articles and blog posts for the Web; and performing occasional clerical tasks. Reporter-researchers work closely with writers and editors, and they have an open invitation to pitch magazine or Web articles. Most reporter-researchers finish their program with a substantial portfolio of clips and have gone on to work almost everywhere in journalism--including TNR itself. Political journalism experience is preferred (but not imperative); fluency with LexisNexis and other search techniques, a willingness to put in long nights fact-checking, and a sense of humor are mandatory. The yearlong job will begin in summer 2010 and will include a stipend. Please e-mail the following items to Seyward Darby at job [at] tnr [dot] com, with the subject line "(Your Name) RR Application 2010":

• A cover letter.
• A one-page résumé.
• A 750-word critique of the politics section (the Mall and Features) of a recent issue of the magazine.
• Two clips (if possible, one opinion and one news).

No phone calls and no snail mail (undue phone calling is especially unwelcome). We don’t have time to let you all know that we received your applications, so please don’t expect confirmation. The deadline is February 12, 2010, but do not submit applications before January 1.

Peter Baker's upcoming New York Times Magazine cover story (mentioned by Mike below) on Obama and terrorism has this slightly unsettling nugget:

[Obama] is committed to taking aggressive actions to disrupt terrorist cells, aides said, but he also considers his speech in Cairo to the Islamic world in June central to his efforts to combat terrorism. “If you asked him what are the most important things he’s done to fight terrorism in his first year, he would put Cairo in the top three,” Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, told me.

Really? This is called putting too much faith in the power of your own words.

Peter Baker's splashy new NYT magazine piece focuses in part on Obama's newly-visible counterterrorism chief:

Most of those people, of course, were in the moderate camp inside the Bush administration, not the Cheney cadre, or like Brennan they present themselves as simply career professionals who followed orders or who even quietly dissented from the most extreme policies of the last eight years. “I was somebody who did oppose waterboarding,” Brennan told me. “I opposed different aspects of the enhanced interrogation program. But there were some aspects of it that I concurred with.” For instance, he offered, “if you grab somebody by the lapels, and you say, Oh, my goodness, you’ve violated their rights as a person, well, I’m not going to go that far.”

Time and circumstances have changed as well. “Four years ago, I would have said — and I did say — the agency’s detention program needed to continue,” Brennan said, referring to the secret “black site” overseas prisons ran by the C.I.A. “There have been a lot of developments and changes, so the things I might have advocated three or four years ago, because of the changed conditions, because of a new administration, whatever, I wouldn’t necessarily advocate them now at all. I’ve changed my views.”

Brennan says the administration will try to get Abdulmutallab to sing about the terrorists who devised his mission by offering him a plea deal. What will Brennan recommend if he refuses?

Good WSJ story on how al Qaeda operatives migrate away from U.S. military pressure, always finding the next safe haven:

U.S. and allied-government officials have claimed significant progress against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq recently. But the group appears able to nimbly deploy forces to places where international military pressure isn't as concentrated or has eased, including most recently Yemen and Somalia, according to officials and analysts.

Arab intelligence officers say they have tracked foreign fighters allied with al Qaeda traveling from one Mideast battlefield to another -- in particular from Iraq to Yemen, and, over the summer, from Pakistan to Yemen....

The global network "moves to the weakest point," says Mustafa Alani, director of security and terrorism studies at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, a think tank. "In Yemen, they have found opportunity."

Obama has his hands pretty full right now just responding to this new threat. But at some point I'd like to see him explain whether and how it affects his thinking about going big in Afghanistan. You can make the case that it only raises the stakes in our larger confrontation with al Qaeda. But there's also a strong argument suggesting that we just can't win this fight through major military action, and all those billions of dollars are better spent on surveillance, drones, and counter-terror training for local forces. I still haven't quite made up my own mind.

Any bets on whether Obama would have made a different AfPak decision had Abdulmutllab popped up a few weeks earlier?

The only bright spot in the cases of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up that Christmas Day flight, and the five men who went to Pakistan to receive terrorist training, was that members of the wannabe-terrorists' families approached authorities because of their children's behavior. As an ever-larger percentage of right-wing commentators demand that Abdulmutallab be water-boarded or worse, it does seem worth asking whether parents will offer their children up to law enforcement if they--the parents--believe their kids will be tortured.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously called Wilson his "intellectual conscience," and some considered him the twentieth century's preeminent man of letters. From his perch as TNR's literary editor, and then as a roving correspondent, critic Edmund Wilson was in large part responsible for the introduction of literary modernism to American culture. (He also discovered or solidified the reputations of Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, along with numerous others, and wrote one of the century's seminal intellectual histories.) Below, we've collected several of Wilson's major magazine pieces from the archives:

"Still Life," November 10, 1926. The death of a flapper.

"The Old Conviviality and the New," May 12, 1926. New Orleans during the Derby.

"Reunion," April 27, 1927. Gin shots and the memory of World War I.

"Portrait of a Sage," May 1, 1929. A genuine intellectual and his lovely daughters.

"Mr. More and the Mithraic Bull," May 26, 1937. The Great Man remembers T.S. Eliot.