The New Republic

For years now, electronics manufacturers have struggled to develop "electronic readers"--handheld devices that could function, in effect, as iPods for books and magazines. I have written about their efforts a couple of times for the magazine (click here and here). READ MORE >>

The year is 2020. A young Muslim preacher has been proclaimed thenew caliph, attracting a worldwide following that includes thedaughter of an American senator. Civil wars and insurgencies ragethroughout the Muslim world and beyond. Muslim athletes at theOlympics declare loyalty to the caliphate over their own nations.Histories of previous caliphates soar on Amazon's best- sellerlist. READ MORE >>

The statistics are staggering. Winged Migration, a French documentary about birds in flight, took four years to make. It employed, as it proceeded, a total crew of four hundred fifty. It was shot in a global variety of places-or over them, rather-to capture the four principal migration routes: those used by North American birds, European and Asian birds, Asian birds, and Southeast Asian birds. Needed for the cinematography were gliders and model gliders, helicopters and model ones, light motorized aircraft, and balloons. READ MORE >>

 FOR THE THIRD time, and after two years, one was back. There seemed at first so little that had changed: in Saigon there were new traffic lights in the Rue Catina and rather more beer bottle tops trodden into the asphalt outside the Continental Hotel and the Imperial Bar. Le Journal d'Extreme Orient reported the same operations in the north within the delta defenses erected by De Lattre, around Nam Dinh and Thai-Binh, the same account of enemy losses, the same reticence about French Union losses. READ MORE >>