cold war

The last book I read in 2022 was Chris Miller’s excellent Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. It was thanks to this book, that I realized that Miller has also written an excellent account of why the Soviet Union collapsed suddenly in the 1980s in his 2020 book, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR. While there exists a lot of dense literature in economics on problems with socialist economic models, Miller’s work is perhaps the simplest account…

Tell us about The Inheritors. How did the idea for it come about? Author Nadeem Zaman (Courtesy the subject) In early 2021, during spring semester at the college where I teach, I’d included The Great Gatsby in the syllabus, and during class discussion one day it struck me how the issues – social, historical, political – in the book spoke to me through the lens of modern Dhaka and Bangladesh. How did I not see that before, was my thought? Inequalities of wealth, society intrigue, veneers, gossip, affairs, all of…

The CIA had multiple directors that oversaw the U.S.’ reportedly disastrous use of fake websites for overseas operations from at least 2004 to 2013, but none could see just how easily identifiable any of these websites really were.Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP (Getty Images)Security researchers from Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto said on Thursday they found fatal flaws in a massive network of 885 fake websites that they have “high confidence” were previously used by the Central Intelligence Agency for covert…

For All Mankind season 2 — premiering February 19 on Apple TV+ worldwide — continues to explore the ripple effects of the Soviets putting a man (and a woman) on the Moon before the Americans. In some ways, it created a better, equitable world in the USA. Women enjoy a better position at NASA (in spacesuits and in the boardroom) and in society (the Equal Rights Amendment actually got ratified), though the same can't be said about race relations. And as the For All Mankind season 1 post-credits scene revealed, NASA's Sea…