Doing the Times' Homework

It's a curious honor to have the New York Times trolling your blog for reported story ideas. Nonetheless, that honor goes to our own Jeffrey Lewis, publisher of ArmsControlWonk.com, and director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative here at the New America Foundation.

Here's the scoop. Published in today's New York Times, William J. Broad's article, "A Tantalizing Look at Iran's Nuclear Program," explored an intriguing new source of intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program: photographs by the official Iranian news agency of President Ahmadinejad touring nuclear facilities with his defence minister, intelligence minister, and top nuclear expert.

The highest compliment, however, was the inclusion of the Times' own annotated photograph. Showing his true geek credentials, Jeffrey's original, hand-drawn annotated picture, shown above, focused only on the hardware.

Of course there were other items of interest in the photo to the wider readership of the Times, including a few powerful individuals and a couple of flags. Jumping on the case, the Grey Lady spared no expense, and, digging deeply into the comments section of Jeffrey's blog post, rounded out it's multimedia feature with labels for the inidividuals and flags already ID'd by the dedicated team of ArmsControlWonks.

Congratulations, Jeffrey. Imitation is the highest compliment.