New York Magazine

The Pakistani city where Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALS on May 2, 2011, made for a discordant place for the principal villain of 9/11 to die. No longer cave-bound in the sawtooth mountains of Waziristan, he had bunkered down amid modern conveniences: a gas-station mini-mart selling Diet Coke, a travel agency booking flights to Rome, a Barclays bank doling rupees through its high-functioning cash machine. Along with four major hospitals, the Pakistan Military Academy, and several prestigious academic institutions, ­Abbott­abad (pronounced OPT-uh-bad by residents) is home to St.

September 11 broke open a generations-long battle raging inside Islam over who has the right to speak for the faith. On one side is the Islamic religious Establishment, embodied by the scholars who gather behind closed doors to debate theology. On the other, the self-proclaimed reformers of a diversifying global community of 1.6 billion (four fifths of whom don't reside in the Middle East), determined to apply the tenets of their faith to worldly problems.

In June, six weeks after Osama bin Laden's death in Abbottabad, Al Qaeda finally officially confirmed what had been all but a foregone conclusion: that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the prickly Egyptian surgeon who had been bin Laden's longtime deputy, is the new head of the terrorist group.

The long-held conventional view is that Zawahiri has really been the brains of the operation all along, a jihadist Karl Rove to bin Laden's George W. Bush. That was once true. But over time, bin Laden eased Zawahiri into the role of one of his followers, albeit an important one.

Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a.k.a. the blind sheikh, was, in an important sense, the ideological architect or the spiritual guide of 9/11. Rahman’s directives made their appearance at an unusual event held at one of bin Laden’s bases in eastern Afghanistan on May 26, 1998, the first, and last, press conference ever given by Al Qaeda’s leaders.

The riots that began a little more than a week ago in the ghetto of Tottenham, north London, and then spread to cities throughout England were, from the start, weird and entrancing. The troubles started August 4, when London police fatally shot a 29-year-old Tottenham man named Mark Duggan, and intensified during a protest over his killing two days later, when a teenage girl threw what was reported to be a Champagne bottle at a line of cops, some of whom retaliated by beating her.

If you are looking not only for clues into Barack Obama’s character but for a definition of what his presidency will mean to the country, then the speech on fiscal policy that he delivered at George Washington University the Wednesday before last is the most significant one he has ever given. It is, in its own way, an astonishing document, alive with the themes that undergirded his Philadelphia speech on race and his Nobel Prize acceptance, on the tragic enmeshment of American limitations and American strength.

The part of Israel that remains perfect to Martin Peretz is vanishingly small. But it does still exist, tangibly enough that you could trace its perimeter on a map of Tel Aviv: the ethnically mixed neighborhoods of Jaffa, the impeccably preserved Bauhaus downtown, the symphony halls and dance theaters, the intersections that still hold traffic, tense and honking, at 2:30 in the morning, the cosmopolitan sidewalk cafés that make real the old liberal dream.

This summer, Peter Beinart—once a protégé of Peretz's—published an influential essay in The New York Review of Books arguing that liberalism and Zionism ...

In retrospect, from the moment in July 2009 when Peter Galbraith found out about the ghost polling centers being established all around Afghanistan, his future path was fixed. Galbraith was then second in command of the U.N. mission in Kabul, and he and several election officials had helicoptered onto a hilltop near the city of Khost, a creepy, bunkered spot where contractors were building fences and digging ditches to keep the Taliban out. The situation looked medieval.

Last month, Peter Beinart, a former editor at The New Republic, published a long essay in The New York Review of Books blaming the American Jewish ...