Blog

I’m now the editor of www.newyorker.com and all of my posts are appearing there. Here are the latest two:

Klout is Evil. But it can be saved.
Is Netflix doomed?

The New York Times has an excellent story about The Atavist, a publication I helped found. The ideas has been to create a way to use multi-media to enhance long-form narrative story telling, on digital device, in surprising and wonderful ways.

I have the great honor of having been selected as this year’s Nitze Senior Fellow at St. Mary’s College in Maryland and will be giving three lectures there this March and April. Details here.

A nice write-up of a talk I gave last week at the Mid-Coast Forum on Foreign Relations.

A short post I just wrote for newyorker.com.

The ever-interesting H-Diplo Diplomatic and International History Discussion Network has just posted four (very interesting)  critiques of the Hawk and the Dove, along with my response. You can read the whole thing by clicking here.

I had a fascinating hour-long conversation a little while back with Marshall Poe, which he has now posted on his site: New Books in History.

FDR: MPI/Getty

I just got a copy of Jeff Shesol’s new book Supreme Power, an investigation into FDR’s efforts to pack the Supreme Court in 1937. (You can read a rave review from the NYT here.) Shesol’s previous book, Mutual Contempt, about the relationship between LBJ and RFK, was terrific and I used it as one of the structural models for The Hawk and the Dove, studying it whenever I needed to figure out a new way to pass the narrative baton from one character to another. The court-packing episode was important to Nitze too. He grew up a Republican, but switched to the Democratic Party in the 1930s. When Roosevelt tried to monkey with the judiciary, Nitze rejoined the GOP; but then he switched out again soon thereafter—setting a pattern that would last his lifetime.

Here is footage from a talk I gave about the book in Madison. My favorite story from this event is that one of the people in the audience walked out during the introduction and huffed, “I thought we were going to hear Nietzsche’s grandson.”

David Hoffman has a smart piece in Foreign Policy making the case that the current moment is crucial if President Obama really wants to make progress in moving us toward a world with no (or at least vastly fewer) nuclear weapons.