Courage Under Fire

First came the water pouring down the slopes of Japan's Mount Fuji on October 19, 1979. Then on top of the torrents came the fire that killed 13 U.S. Marines and burned dozens more. Though investigators afterward may not have consulted the Bible, they ended up attributing the unusual mix of elements involved to the same force that, per the Book of Exodus, enveloped ancient Egypt in hail and fire. "It was an act of God," investigators concluded.

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In the Mind of McNamara

One of the few aspects of the Vietnam war about which most historians agree is that Robert McNamara horribly mismanaged it as secretary of defense. There is no agreement, however, on how McNamara did the nation such a disservice. For those who view American intervention in Vietnam as unnecessary and inherently futile, McNamara is condemned for getting the United States into the war and then for refusing to get it out once he himself became disillusioned. For those who view the intervention as a noble cause that could have ended victoriously, McNamara's principal failing was his imposition of severe restraints on the military.

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Saudi Arabia’s Ruthless Reformer

Napoleon Bonaparte was once asked what makes a good general. His alleged reply—“audacity, audacity, always audacity”—made it onto the long list of sayings attributed to the French commander. It is less clear, however, whether these attributes make for a good ruler. But as Karen Elliott House shows in her new book, The Man Who Would Be King: Mohammed Bin Salman and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia, we might just find out.

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McCloskey’s Latest Spy Thriller Turns a New Page

In just five years, David McCloskey has gone from being a complete unknown to his current status as one of our leading writers of spy fiction, a remarkably rapid ascent. While his first three novels—Damascus Station (2021), Moscow X (2023), and The Seventh Floor (2024)—were set in the same fictional universe, centered around the CIA (where McCloskey himself spent seven or eight years as an analyst, mostly in the Middle East), The Persian marks a new departure.

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The Sacred and Profane Decade

One of the stranger moments in the history of American popular music occurred in the winter of 1986, when the chorus of the hottest song on the pop charts featured Greek lyrics from a Christian prayer. Teenagers speeding with their friends rolled down their windows, let the wind blow their Aqua Netted hair, and yelled, “Kyrie Eleison”—Lord have mercy—“down the road that I must travel!” At keg parties in fraternities and sororities across the land, college students sang, in the native language of their social organizations, “Lord have mercy through the darkness of the night.” And while it’s true that many of the song’s fans probably thought they were singing “carry a laser,” Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie Eleison” topped the Billboard 100 for two consecutive weeks. As Tom Breihan describes it, the hit pop song is “a textbook example of ambiguous worship music.”

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A Book So Bad It Shattered Liberals' Faith in DEI

Karine Jean-Pierre can't stop making history. Earlier this year, the former White House press secretary became the highest-ranking openly queer, French-born black woman with a hyphenated surname to publicly renounce the Democratic Party for being mean to Joe Biden. She is the only black female lesbian immigrant to publish a book about her time in the Biden administration. It is the worst political memoir ever written in the history of the English language.

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Charity Run Amok

"The members of the Casey family have from the beginning intended that the principal purpose of the Annie E. Casey Foundation would be to support needy children in foster homes," Jim Casey wrote around 1947. Casey, who founded UPS, was worried about impoverished children, particularly orphans. He set up his foundation in 1948, and as of 2023, the endowment was valued at $3.4 billion.

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The Constitutional Commentary We Need

There's a familiar lament among constitutionalists—one heard at law schools, in courtrooms, and across think tank hallways—that most Americans know next to nothing about the nation's founding document. Ask a random college graduate about the Emoluments Clause or the Compact Clause and you'll get a blank stare. Yet even among lawyers and judges, constitutional knowledge is often shallow, piecemeal, or warped by ideology.

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C.P. Cavafy: Cosmopolitan Poet

Early in their biography of the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933), Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys announce that they have written a "thematic" as opposed to a "linear" biography. The facts of their subject's life, they hold, are rather unremarkable and straightforward. "We have chosen, therefore, to start and finish his life story with his death and then tell a circular narrative through various thematic sequences." They continue: "The thematic approach also enables us to draw attention to the artificiality of biography as a type of writing."

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Shots Heard Round the World

In the year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, separate regional wars in Europe and Asia became a world war that engulfed hundreds of millions of people in conflicts spanning the globe. The year witnessed the Axis alliance at the height of its power, as well as significant Allied victories that would pave the way for the liberation of captive peoples within three blood-drenched years. This was also the year when the Nazis operationalized the Final Solution, condemning millions to be murdered in death camps in Poland and in less structured ways elsewhere. Before 1942, the United States was an economic behemoth but militarily weak; by the end of the year, America had taken huge strides toward becoming a superpower in every sense of the term, with Ford Motor Company alone outproducing the entire nation of Italy. In 1942, Peter Fritzsche, professor of history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a noted authority on Hitler, National Socialism, and the Third Reich, surveys the changes wrought by this formative year in World War II.

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