The Washington Monthly

I recently asked Oxblood Ruffin, a programmer working to help dissidents who use the Internet to skirt repressive governments, about efforts to foment digitally borne subversion in China. Alas, he said, Chinese Internet users care more about slipping past pornographic censors than political ones. "There's a sort of Western romance associated with Web censorship that imagines all those poor folks in China, Iran, etc., just can't wait to get to CNN. Although this is true for some people, many more… more

When Lyndon Johnson was president between 1963 and 1969, the world grew familiar with the "Western White House"--the Johnson ranch on the Pedernales River west of Austin, in the heart of his beloved central Texan hill country. Three decades later, newly elected President George W. Bush began hosting foreign leaders and American officials at his own ranch--this one north of Austin in Crawford, Texas. To make sure that television audiences got the point, Bush aides hung a pompous "Western White… more

Last April, several hundred black-tie and couture-clad worthies crowded into the ornate ballroom of the Washington Ritz-Carlton for one more dinner on the spring charity circuit. This one seemed especially well-suited for the usual crowd of congressmen's wives and old-school hostesses. Themed "Coming of Age," the entire evening was a salute to the vibrancy of middle-aged women--from the appearance by Cheryl Ladd of "Charlie's Angels" fame, glittering and trim at 51; through a special photography exhibit tided "A Celebration of… more

In most ways, Patriensa is just another tiny town amidst lush farming land in the Ashanti region of Ghana: a remote part of a remote country where per-capita income is less than a dollar a day. The day starts when the rooster crows and ends at about 9 p.m., when everyone has finished eating their pounded yams and plantains.

To Osei Darkwa, however, Patriensa is the ideal place to build a technological metropolis. A calm, jovial man who isn't sure… more

On the three month commemoration of the September 11 attacks, Secretary of the Treasury Paul H. O'Neill, yielding to congressional pressure, held a press conference to announce a new way Americans could fight the war on terrorism. Besides going to the mall or investing in the stock market, they could go to the bank and buy up the government's brand new "Patriot Bonds."

But unlike the great war-bond drives of the past, this campaign involved no celebrities -- not even Bono… more

On a bright California day last April, Arnold Schwarzenegger was out of character. Instead of shooting up bad guys on a movie set, he was driving to the Los Angeles county clerk's office in a truck loaded with petitions bearing 750,000 signatures in support of a ballot initiative to fund California after-school programs, known as the After School Education and Safety Act. The proposal, spearheaded by Schwarzenegger, would offer a matching grant to every public elementary, middle, and junior high… more

Pick up The Wall Street Journal today, and the business pages are full of stories about the men and women who built the stock market bubble. Months into the current downturn, the saga of Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, and other 1990s cheats has become the biggest running business story in decades -- and business journalists are hot on the trail. Should we blame sticky-fingered CEOs? Self-dealing analysts and accountants? Board members asleep at the switch? Absolutely. But there's another sector… more

The Internet post-mortems are coming fast and furious nowadays, from John Cassidy's trifling Dot.con to James Ledbetter's forthcoming Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year, a tell-all about The Industry Standard's fleeting heyday. So far, this literature of failure has portrayed the technology boom as a madcap adventure, and the subsequent bust as little more than a sitcom comeuppance for a handful of arrogant louts. Sure, a couple billion dollars got lost in the shuffle, and some… more

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi has a theory that he thinks may explain the spread of cancer, the Asian economic meltdown, and the ubiquity of Washington insider Vernon Jordan. To understand it all, you have to follow a simple rule: "Think networks."

To illustrate his point, Barabasi uses the famous game, "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," in which the second-tier movie star can be linked with almost any other actor in a couple of simple steps. Charlie Chaplin, for example, was in… more

In 1984, Internet pioneer Stewart Brand made one of the most prescient observations of the technology era: "On the one hand, information wants to be expensive because it is so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

Brand's insight is famous… more