Hmm, maybe this is why John Kerry didn't want to badmouth him:

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

Ever since he helped convince Hamid Karzai last week to agree to a run-off election, John Kerry has become a critical player on Afghanistan policy to a degree that's surprising even for a chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Today, Kerry gave a speech on Afghanistan at the Council on Foreign Relations, in which he indicated that, while he thinks General McChrystal's counterinsurgency plan is too ambitious, he would support Obama sending some additional troops. A couple hours after the speech, in an interview with TNR, Kerry talked about how and why he believes Karzai has changed and what he considers his own role to be in working with the Obama administration.

Robert Altman: The Oral Biography

By Mitchell Zuckoff

(Knopf, 592 pp., $35)

Here is your exam question: who is the last American movie director who made thirty-nine films but never won the Oscar for best director? Name the film by that director that cost the most money, and name the film of his that earned the most. Clue: The Departed, which must have been around Martin Scorsese’s thirtieth picture, and did win the directing Oscar, cost $90 million (four times as much as any of this man’s films cost)--so don’t go that way. Background info: Gosford Park cost $15 million; Nashville cost $2.2 million; M.A.S.H. cost about $3.5 million, and earned around $70 million; Popeye cost $20 million (in 1980). Here is your assignment: assess and reconcile these allegations in an essay of approximately 3,000 words. (Note: banish from your mind any insinuation that nowadays a director who makes thirty-nine films has to be given a best director Oscar--though it is not easy to think of many that fecund who don’t have a bronze fetish to nurse at night.)

David Roth is a writer living in New York.

They cruise through cities, klezmer pumping from the speakers of RVs emblazoned with the image of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. They approach even vaguely Semitic-seeming pedestrians with the question, "Are you Jewish?" and are known for their expansionist approach to growing their congregations. Outreach, in short, is what the orthodox Jewish Chabad Lubavitch movement does.

Now that Chris Dodd has decided to keep his chairmanship of the Senate banking committee, it looks like Tom Harkin will leave his agriculture post to go take Ted Kennedy's former spot atop the HELP committee. To the dismay of a lot of food-policy reformers, this means the more conservative Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas will be next in line for the Ag Committee gavel (there are more senior members on that committee, but they all have other, more powerful chairmanships already).

It's not unreasonable to ask if this will really make a big difference as far as agricultural policy's concerned. After all, Harkin was a corn man from Iowa who always had a kind word for Monsanto; the farm bill during his tenure was as subsidy-laden as ever, and, more recently, he was praising House Ag Chair Collin Peterson's extortionist moves on climate-change legislation, even suggesting that Peterson didn't go far enough in his attempts to immunize farmers from the effects of the bill. How much worse could Lincoln be?

Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.   

Believe it or not, it's becoming possible to get a feeling for how the health care reform struggle may play out this fall.

Massive cheating or not?

A new kind of coup d’etat or not?

How do we interpret this strange election whose results were announced by the press affiliated with the secret services and militia--even before the polls were closed?

Considering the absence of international observers, considering that the election officials demanded by Ahmadinejad’s rivals were chased from polling places with billy clubs, and considering the climate of terror in which the whole process was steeped, it is hard to come down on one side or the other with much certainty.

"It's a rough patch I'm going through," says Chris Dodd. How rough? Not long ago, Dodd entertained dreams of ascending to the White House. He moved his family to Iowa in 2007 and enrolled his daughter in a Des Moines public school, all in the hope of winning the state's caucus. He gave solid (if never spectacular) performances in debates while fund-raising prodigiously. And, though he didn't vault into the top tier of candidates, he managed to end his bid for the presidency with his long-standing reputation as a serious player in Democratic politics basically intact.

On Monday, Nancy Pelosi made an announcement that was buried amid the tumult over the Steny Hoyer-Jack Murtha battle for House majority leader. It was the appointment of Representative Michael Capuano, a Massachusetts Democrat, to be the head of Pelosi's "transition team" as she assumes the job of House speaker.

The fairy tale began to unravel in the most unlikely of locations: The electronics aisle at Target. It was late September, the day after the Anderson family, as they had come to be known, first made their journey from a shelter in Houma, Louisiana, to a home in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The family, all of them refugees from Hurricane Katrina, had relocated to the Midwest at the invitation of a Catholic church group based in Kalamazoo.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

By Michael Lewis (W. W. Norton, 288 pp., $24.95)

The Boston Celtics, a team I have followed obsessively since I was nine, didn't make the NBA finals last week, losing to the New Jersey Nets. But in defeat they achieved something even more important: They answered questions that have haunted the team, and the city, for decades. The Chicago Tribune posed them this way, in a 1992 article marking the retirement of Larry Bird: "Must the Celtics ... have a white star to placate the nearly all-white-ticket-holder base? Will Boston support a nearly all-black team?"

Over a thousand delegates gathered in early October at the Sheraton Chicago for the fifteenth annual Hispanic leadership conference. The gleaming hotel, towering over the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, seemed emblematic of Hispanics' growing political heft. Speakers at the conference included former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry G. Cisneros, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, and Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman. But no one attracted as much attention--or adulation--as Bill Richardson, former Congressman from New Mexico and America's new ambassador to the United Nations.

There is a revolution afoot, according to the Nike shoe company—a revolution in sneakers, heralded by a $7 million TV ad campaign featuring the Beatles song "Revolution." It's the first time that Capitol Records has licensed an original Beatles record for use in a TV commercial. The 30-second ads, done in a black-and-white documentary style, feature ordinary jocks intercut with sports superstars such as basketball player Michael Jordan and tennis champion John McEnroe, while John Lennon sings, "You say you want a revolution." The new sneakers cost $75 a pair.

This piece was originally published on October 20th, 1920.

Another baseball season is about to begin. It will be a good season. Every baseball season is a good one. The strength of the game is proved year after year, despite expansion teams (which in recent years have done no worse than the old St. Louis Browns used to do season after season) and changes in rules and record-keeping. The designated hitter experiment seems to have done no lasting harm.