Jedediah Purdy

The US Senate judiciary committee has drawn a line in the water -- and is holding it. Before the committee's Democrats approve Michael Mukasey's nomination for attorney general, they want to know that he believes waterboarding is torture under United States law. Simulating drowning to get terrified detainees to speak, a favourite technique of the Khmer Rouge, strikes many as a paradigm of torture. If it isn't torture, what does the word mean?

This is about more than a terrible practice.… more

One of the standard complaints about Hillary Clinton's candidacy is that she reminds everyone of 15 years of partisan anger. Like Pavlov's bells, the story goes, she starts Americans salivating over mental maps of red and blue. There's something to that. Many Bush supporters loathed both Clintons, and liberals have amply returned the sentiment since 2000.

But bitter partisan division isn't a genetic disorder of the country's two dynastic houses, the hemophilia of 21st-century American politics. Something else links the Clintons… more

Internet utopianism can seem so 1998. The future was silicon in the late Clinton years, when government was flatlining in petty scandal and technology stocks seemed to rise exponentially. Not only was anything possible: If you believed the mavens of Wired magazine and assorted other cyber-prophets, pretty much anything was inevitable. Soon, they assured us, people would spend more time in virtual communities than in "meatspace." Politics would be transformed by the universal pamphleteering of Netizens. Oh, and some of… more

I was in Washington, lingering in that immortally perfect fall weather as I walked to work. A friend from Boston called my cell to tell me "not to go near anything." Then I saw that half the people I passed didn’t know, and were blithely planning dinners and video rentals. The other half had blanks for eyes. Two blocks later, I hit a store window with a television, just beginning to replay the image that would never go away.

Everyone has… more

The idea that everything changed on September 11, 2001, was always a conceit. It was a conceit not because it exaggerated the importance of the event, but, curiously, because it underestimated it. The attacks on New York and Washington, for all their terrible human cost, did not change much by themselves. They did, however, change the horizon of political possibility. The shock of that morning, followed by the endlessly repeated images of the collapsing towers and New York’s blasted downtown,… more

Will globalization destroy itself? Every few years, another crisis suggests it might. The Internet, satellite phones, and intercontinental air travel help terrorists cross the world in an instant. The global spread of democracy shakes authoritarian governments -- and opens the way for Islamists in Tehran and Cairo, a populist strongman in Venezuela, and nuke-happy nationalists in New Delhi. Open capital markets wreck the economies of Southeast Asia. Divisions between Muslim immigrants and the rest of Europe explode in French riots… more

One of my favorite pieces from the Onion, the satirical newspaper, appeared just after September 11, 2001. It opened, "Feeling helpless in the wake of the horrible September 11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands, Christine Pearson baked a cake and decorated it like an American flag Monday." True to form, the article is lightly ironic as it traces the fictional Topeka legal secretary's rummage through her kitchen cabinets in a frenzy of distress and media exhaustion. It ends, though, with… more

Jedediah Purdy is Assistant Professor of Law at Duke Law School, where he teaches ethics, and property, constitutional, and environmental law. He was a Fellow at the New America Foundation in 2001 and 2002, and rejoined the Foundation in 2004 after completing a clerkship with Judge Pierre N. Leval of… more

In a country as wealthy and technologically capable as the United States, there is no such thing as a simple natural disaster. Every disaster is also a social event, made up by human will and ingenuity--or neglect and indifference. Famines, famously, do not happen in democracies, because no matter how severe a drought or blight, only the voiceless and powerless are ever left to starve. Storms may sometimes wreck cities; but if they also claim thousands of… more

Understandably, Europeans think of George W. Bush as a president focused on foreign policy. In the three years between al Qaeda's attacks on the United States and his re-election, Bush invaded two countries, reworked America's global alliances, and brought to crisis the traditional relationship across the North Atlantic. It is unlikely that he would have been re-elected without the air of perpetual crisis that his foreign policy brought to the recent presidential campaign.

In 2000, however, Bush was… more