Nicholas Thompson: All Related Content

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Twitter Isn’t Evil

  • By
  • Nicholas Thompson,
  • New America Foundation
January 31, 2012 |

Twitter, it is said, has become evil. The company announced at the end of last week that it would censor tweets on a country-by-country basis. If a government really doesn’t like your hundred and forty characters, Twitter may white them out. Tweetavists reacted with outrage and warned darkly of unreported massacres in Syria. A #twitterblackout protest was organized.

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Ideas Man

  • By
  • Nicholas Thompson,
  • New America Foundation
January 3, 2012 |

The first book to complicate the reputation of George Kennan came out in 1967. It was 600 pages long, and the cover would show a forlorn young man staring right at you. The tale was of an awkward boy from the Midwest who never quite fits in. He gains knowledge in the Foreign Service and becomes the United States' wisest Soviet analyst. Then, for a brief -- but crucial -- moment, he serves as the head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff under President Harry Truman, helping remake the world after World War II.

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Devil's Bargain: Wall St. & The Martin Act | New York Post

August 30, 2011

Equally important was that, over the decades, it became subject to an “unspoken gentleman's agreement” (as Nicholas Thompson called it in a 2004 Legal Affairs piece). Crusading prosecutors like Louis Lefkowitz used the act to chase out of town the ...

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Can You Hear Me Now? Why Your Cell Phone Sucks | KPCC

April 1, 2010

New America’s Nicholas Thompson, about the sorry state of American mobile technology and what can be done about it.

Original article.

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Nuclear Monopolist

  • By
  • Nicholas Thompson,
  • New America Foundation
January 8, 2010 |

Early in the morning of Aug. 29, 1949, a mushroom cloud soared up over the Kazakh deserts. The Soviets had detonated their first atomic bomb, a thrilling feat of engineering and physics. The man who had supervised the effort, the pitiless chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, raced to telephone Stalin. But when the leader came on the line he declared that he already knew and hung up.

It was an enigmatic and devious response from the ultimate enigmatic and devious man. Stalin’s aim, Michael D. Gordin suggests, was just “to put Beria in his place.”

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Forecast: Self-Serving

  • By
  • Nicholas Thompson,
  • New America Foundation
November 5, 2009 |

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita wants you to buy his book. He wants royalties and he wants fame. He wants the book to promote his consulting business. The text may well be full of self-promotional tall tales and calumny -- unless the author calculated that the costs of dishonesty (potential intellectual disrepute) outweighed the benefits (more fame, royalties and consulting). When he walks into bookstores, he probably moves his book from the back shelves to the front. If he knew I was writing this review, he'd think about crafty ways to manipulate me.

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Nicholas Thompson on Cold-War Lessons for Afghanistan

October 13, 2009

In this week's New America/Politico Live Chat, Nicholas Thompson will be online to discuss the dueling views on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan -- and how foreign policies forged in the Cold War continue to shape today's debate.

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The Hawk and the Dove | Washington Times

October 13, 2009

A review of Nick Thompson’s book from the Washington Times ... Original Article

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The Hawk and the Dove | American Spectator

October 7, 2009
Nicholas Thompson is an editor at Wired magazine and a fellow at the New America Foundation; he is also Nitze's grandson. The familial ties do not interfere, though, ...
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Soviet Doomsday Machine | Wired News

September 30, 2009
This week's Storyboard Podcast takes a look at two stories in the October issue of Wired: “The Dead Hand” by Nick Thompson and “The ...
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Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine

  • By
  • Nicholas Thompson,
  • New America Foundation
September 28, 2009 |

Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It's March 2009-the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago-but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.

"The Perimeter system is very, very nice," he says. "We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military." He looks around again.

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Nuclear Pushback | The Washington Post

September 27, 2009
Kennan's words are cited in Nicholas Thompson's brilliant new book, "The Hawk and the Dove," a joint biography of Kennan and his friend and policy rival Paul Nitze. The book is also a penetrating, amazingly accessible study of the origins and conduct of the Cold War. ... Original Article
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Throwing Light on Cold War | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

September 27, 2009
Nicholas Thompson, a reporter and Nitze's grandson, argues that while Kennan set the course of the Cold War, Nitze tried to win it. His dual biography of the two reveals a great deal about the early days of that superpower conflict and its aftermath. ... Original Article
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The Hawk and The Dove | Morning Joe (MSNBC)

September 23, 2009

The Hawk And The Dove | National Review Online

September 22, 2009

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The Hawk and the Dove

September 15, 2009

Only two Americans held positions of great influence throughout the Cold War; ironically, they were the chief advocates for the opposing strategies for winning--and surviving--that harrowing conflict. Both men came to power during World War II, reached their professional peaks during the Cold War's most frightening moments, and fought epic political battles that spanned decades. Yet despite their very different views, Paul Nitze and George Kennan dined together, attended the weddings of each other's children, and remained good friends all their lives.

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The Hawk And The Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, And The History Of The Cold War | Washington Post

September 13, 2009
In "The Hawk and the Dove," Nicholas Thompson, an editor at Wired magazine, skillfully contrasts Nitze and Kennan. Thompson, who is Nitze's grandson, brings a judicial impartiality to the fierce disputes that raged between the two men. Thompson has enjoyed full access to his grandfather's archival documents, but perhaps his most impressive accomplishment is to have mined Kennan's extensive diaries for new insights.
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The Hawk And The Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, And The History Of The Cold War | New York Times

September 11, 2009

Nicholas Thompson says he was often taken aback by what he learned about his grandfather.

After all, Mr. Thompson is Nitze's grandson, and he had access to all of his grandfather's personal papers and letters, as well as to his family, his closest friends, even to his opponents, the old Soviet warriors who sat opposite him at the negotiating table.

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The Hawk and the Dove | The Washington Monthly

September 9, 2009
History can also be biography, as this excellent book by Nicholas Thompson, an editor at Wired magazine, demonstrates. ... Original Article
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CNBC Probes Ailing Porn Biz | Philadelphia Inquirer

July 15, 2009
In fact, according to Wired magazine's Nick Thompson, porn's now facing the same challenges the music industry is. "They've responded slightly differently, ...
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Twitter Revolution in Iran | CNN

June 21, 2009
Nicholas Thompson from Wired magazine explains Twitter's role in Iran during the post-election unrest, even as some means of communication are blocked by the government. Link to video
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And Data for All

  • By
  • Nicholas Thompson,
  • New America Foundation
June 17, 2009 |

The Obama administration's most radical idea may also be its geekiest: Make nearly every hidden government spreadsheet and buried statistic available online, all in one place. For anyone to see. Are you searching for a Food and Drug Administration report that used to be obtainable only through the Freedom of Information Act? Just a mouseclick away. Need National Institutes of Health studies and school testing scores? Click. Census data, nonclassified Defense Department specs, obscure Securities and Exchange Commission files, prison statistics? Click click. Click. Click.

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The Need for Speed

  • By
  • Nicholas Thompson,
  • New America Foundation
May 1, 2009 |

Broadband Internet in the United States is a disaster. It’s appalling. It’s embarrassing. It’s preposterous. Compared to the rest of the world, our connections are slow, balky, and expensive. If you divide speed by cost, Australia’s Internet access is three times better than ours; France’s is nine times better; and Japan’s thumps us twenty-one times over. We’re catching fish with our hands, while they are out in trawlers. And the reason doesn’t have to do with anything intrinsically American. It’s not, for example, that the country is too rural. Broadband stinks even in Chicago.

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Losing Afghanistan

  • By
  • Nicholas Thompson,
  • New America Foundation
March 15, 2009 |

In early January 1988, 39 Soviet paratroopers were positioned on a cliff overlooking the Gardez-Khost road in southeastern Afghanistan. Their job was to protect the soldiers below, who were trying to open up the dangerous, heavily mined route. All around waited Islamic fundamentalists who had spent the last eight years fighting the Red Army and the government it had installed in Kabul just after Christmas 1979.

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The Plot to Kill Google

  • By
  • Nicholas Thompson,
  • New America Foundation
  • and Fred Vogelstein
January 19, 2009 |

When Google's lawyers entered the smooth marble hallways of the Department of Justice on the morning of October 17, they had reason to feel confident. Sure, they were about to face the antitrust division--an experience most companies dread--to defend a proposed deal with Yahoo. But they had to like their chances. In the previous seven years, only one of the mergers that had been brought here had been opposed. And Google wasn't even requesting a full merger.

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