The New Yorker

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.

In the State of the Union address of 1954, which Dwight Eisenhower delivered less than a year after he had secretly ordered the C.I.A. to overthrow Tehran’s left-leaning government, he celebrated “the forces of stability and freedom” at work in Iran. In 1980, Jimmy Carter delivered his annual address amid the whirlwind of Iran’s Islamic and anti-American revolution, which was inflamed in part by Iranians’ memories of Eisenhower’s coup. “We will face these challenges,” Carter declared.

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Article abstract:

In 2006, Mexico’s newly elected president, Felipe Calderón, declared war on his country’s drug cartels. He militarized and intensified a conflict that had been managed by his predecessors through an opaque strategy of accommodation, payoffs, assigned trafficking routes, and periodic takedowns of uncoöperative capos.

For the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, we asked New Yorker contributors to look back on how their work, and their lives, were changed. Here are Steve Coll’s answers.

Shortly after eleven o'clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard.

ABSTRACT: A REPORTER AT LARGE about the life and death of Osama bin Laden and bin Laden’s use of the media to expand his influence. Writer recalls travelling to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 2005, where he saw the house in which bin Laden had come of age and also visited the offices of an advertising agency run by bin Laden’s eldest son, Abdullah. Comments on the similarities between the house in Jeddah and the house in Pakistan where bin Laden was killed.

The Damascus Spring of 2001 was so called because Syrian democrats hoped that President Bashar al-Assad, a mild-mannered doctor trained in London, who had been installed as the successor to his ruthless father, Hafez, might forswear tyranny. That Spring ended, and some of the hopeful landed in torture rooms.

Steve Coll, Wendell Steavenson, and Hendrik Hertzberg on Obama, Israel, and the Arab Spring.

Original article

On this week’s Political Scene podcast, Steve Coll, Dexter Filkins, and Ryan Lizza join the host, Dorothy Wickenden, to discuss the interplay among America, Pakistan, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban. ...

Original article