The NYT has a short piece today that gives us yet another reminder of why it's so much fun to tell lawyer jokes. (Don't get me wrong: As a journalist, I appreciate this line of humor--much the way residents of Arkansas appreciate the existence of Mississippi when it comes time to whip out the jokes about poor, dumb, toothless, inbred crackers.)
In New Jersey, any candidate for high office can count on getting smeared over taxes, corruption, the economy, or all of the above. But in this fall's hard-fought gubernatorial race, an unlikely issue has popped up amidst the usual mud-slinging: the portly physique of Republican challenger Chris Christie. Ever since Jon Corzine released his now-infamous attack ad, in which a disdainful voiceover claims Christie improperly "threw his weight around" as a U.S.
Thursday October 8, 6:30 a.m., the phone rings. I pick up sleepily. "My family! My family! Magda … my family!" I hear sobbing and low, sad groans on the other end. It is our babysitter, Maricel, originally from the Philippines, where two typhoons--"Ondoy" and "Pepeng," as they are known locally--have caused floods that, over the last few weeks, have killed hundreds, left hundreds of thousands homeless, and inflicted damage estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
For much of this year, one of the surest bets in political circles has been that embattled 
New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine would go down to defeat at the hands of Republican former U.S.
The wittiest scene in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2001 film The Man Who Wasn’t There is one in which a fast-talking defense attorney, Freddy Riedenschneider (marvelously played by Tony Shalhoub), invokes Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as grounds for a not-guilty verdict in a murder case:
We can’t know what really happened.… Because the more you look, the less you know. But the beauty of it is, we don't gotta know! We just gotta show that, goddamnit, they don't know. Reasonable doubt. Science. The atom. You explain it to me. Go ahead, try.
At the time, this routine seemed little more than an offhanded parody of the Michael Frayn play Copenhagen, in which Heisenberg and Nils Bohr discourse windily about the inscrutability of their past actions and intents. But the idea recurs more centrally in the Coen brothers’ new film, A Serious Man, when a beleaguered physics professor named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) explains to his students that the uncertainty principle “proves that we can’t ever know what’s going on.” In this case, it is far less clear whether the assertion is intended as satire or corroboration of Frayn’s metaphor. Indeed, the movie itself is similarly difficult to pin down: part tragedy, part epistemological inquiry, part Jewish comedy of manners.
Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery
By Steve Nicholls
(University of Chicago Press, 524 pp., $30)
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Edited by Bill McKibben
(Library of America, 1,047 pp., $40)
Defending The Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, And The Legacy Of Madison Grant
By Jonathan Peter Spiro
(University of Vermont Press, 462 pp., $39.95)
A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
By Donald Worster
(Oxford University Press, 535 pp., $34.99)
A Reenchanted World: The Quest for A New Kinship With Nature
By James William Gibson
(Metropolitan Books, 306 pp., $27)
Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet
By Edward Humes
(Ecco Books, 367 pp., $25.99)
I.
In contemporary public discourse, concern for "the environment" is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.
Among those who know me well, few can remember when I covered any subjects other than Al Qaeda and the global jihad. I wrote about Osama Bin Laden when he was "Usama bin Ladin." And so since September 14, all anybody's been asking me are questions about a young Afghan immigrant named Najibullah Zazi and his alleged involvement in the first Al Qaeda cell uncovered in America since the 9/11 attacks. Here are my answers to the four most common questions I've been getting.
The New Yorker's Jeff Toobin offers a good response to my open question about how we should be handling Najibullah Zazi, an accused al Qaeda terrorist who may be in league with men still on the loose:
Time to break the waterboard out of storage?
I think not—and not just because it’s illegal. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn which is bringing the case (and where I was a prosecutor in the early nineties) filed a brief where it outlined the reasons why Zazi should be detained rather than released on bail. The brief strongly suggests that our government has been tracking Zazi for months—that investigators have tapped both his computer and his phones, in Pakistan as well as the United States. According to the brief, Zazi has been discussing bomb-making with confederates, sharing information about how to make a bomb, and generally making plans for a terrorist attack. All of this surveillance means that the government has good information about Zazi’s confederates—their phone numbers and email addresses. This information can, of course, be traced back to identify further possible associates. It’s investigative gold.
A rough interrogation of Zazi, Toobin concludes, "would be both immoral and counterproductive."
It's a well-argued case, and I think I agree. But, let's play Devil's Advocate:
When former Democratic Rep. Jim Traficant was released from prison yesterday after 7 years behind bars, the AP reported that he "had his famously wild hair pulled back." Well, yes and no. The piled-high pompadour that had long been the congressman's calling card--the technical term for the style was, I believe, the "artichoke," and Traficant often joked that he trimmed it with a "weed-whacker"--was famous and wild, but it was not in fact his hair. When Traficant was incarcerated in 2002, it was revealed that his signature 'do was, in fact, a toupee, which came as a considerable shock, not because it looked like anything less, but because it seemed remarkable that anyone would pay money to perch such a thing on his own scalp.
Traficant's release offers the opportunity to revisit his career and that of the town, Youngstown, Ohio, whose less-than exemplary character he embodied. David Grann wrote about both back in 2000 in what was, if memory serves, the first piece I ever edited at TNR, "Crimetown, U.S.A." (Yes, I know this is two links to Grann pieces in a week, but these things sometimes happen.) Though Traficant would ultimately be nailed on bribery and racketeering charges, one of the more astonishing sections of the piece concerns an episode far earlier in his career when, appearing as his own attorney, he avoided conviction on corruption charges despite a signed confession and an audio tape of him conspiring with mobsters:
Sitting in her lawyer's office at South Brooklyn Legal Services, her hands folded calmly in her lap, Sandra Barkley describes how she became the first person in her family to buy a home. The 52-year old single mother begins by speaking in a relaxed southern drawl, but as she comes to recount her experiences more fully, her voice rises, and her cool breaks.
From Zach Roth over at TPM:
It looks like Rick Lowry of National Review offered the White House his services in doing some positive P.R. on behalf of Rove protege Tim Griffin, who the administration had sought to sought to muscle into the U.S. attorney job in Arkansas as a replacement for the fired Bud Cummins.
In a January 2007 email, White House political director Sara Taylor wrote:
National Journal's Jonathan Rauch writes movingly of a cousin, Bill, his partner, Mike, and a life-threatening illness:
Over the past few days, there’s been much speculation over whether Attorney General Eric Holder will launch an investigation into the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11.
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America
By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev
(Yale University Press, 637 pp., $35)
The Associated Press reported Monday that advisors to President-Elect Barack Obama “are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials.” This likely signals a major policy shift in the detention and trial of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay.
On the morning of February 21, David Perel, the editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer, was sitting in his Boca Raton office when he pulled up The New York Times website. Scanning the screen, he was surprised by one particularly opaque headline--for mccain, self-confidence on ethics poses its own risk--that topped the Times' now infamous front-page investigation suggesting John McCain had carried on an affair with telecommunications lobbyist Vicki Iseman while he ran the Senate Commerce Committee during the 1990s.
The McCain campaign just sent out an email to supporters excoriating the New York Times for its "scurrilous attack against a great American hero."
"Objective observers," the email says, "are viewing this article exactly as they should--as a sleazy smear attack from a liberal newspaper against the conservative Republican frontrunner."
Last night, around dinnertime, The New York Times postedon its website a 3,000-word investigation detailing Senator John McCain’s connections to a telecommunications lobbyist named Vicki Iseman.
With Hurricane Katrina still over the Gulf of Mexico, Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman, New Orleans's chief jailer, convened his ranking officers for an emergency meeting. Present in the sheriff's conference room that Saturday were most of his wardens, as well as the officer in charge of supplies and the head of the jail's kitchen, a huge feeding operation that prepared more than 18,000 meals per day. The sheriff went around the table, asking the officers if they were prepared for a storm.
