‘In many ways, the current staffing, deployment mode, and size … have not changed since the 1960s,’ wrote Kristin Crowley Karen Bass (Getty Images) Los Angeles fire chief Kristin Crowley warned city officials in November that her department had about half as many firefighters as it needed. When deadly wildfires struck the city two months
Whenever I meet journalists who’ve recently acquired the intel beat, I pity them. The conundrum before all journalists covering senior U.S. officials—criticism versus future access—is acutely true for those covering intelligence since the avenues of access are often severely limited. Congress is always the best bet for getting info on sensitive projects because partisan disagreements
Elliott Abrams’s book If You Will It: Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood for the 21st Century focuses on the great challenges facing American Jewry. Those challenges are not the acute ones—pro-Hamas protesters that make the already overpriced elite four-year college experience an ever worse deal, or the growing acceptance of anti-Semitic violence and vandalism. These are serious
Roughly up until the heyday of John le Carré, the British spy novel tended to follow an approved pattern. A well-educated but bored man, somewhere between youth and middle age, would find himself caught up in an international conspiracy that would involve some, or all, of the following: duplicitous intelligence officers, untrustworthy foreign powers, a
What would happen if a foursome of nonconformist, arty college kids started a band, made music that sounded like nothing on the radio, ground it out on the road in club after grimy club, sat for interviews on radio station after college radio station, remained committed to their musical vision but outworked every other indie
By the time the novelist David Lodge died on January 1 at the age of 89, the obituaries had long been written, gathering dust and occasional updates in the as-needed folder on the desktops of magazine and newspaper editors. And when they were published in the days after New Year’s, they struck an amazingly similar
The devastating wildfires in California followed decades of slow-moving fire prevention efforts delayed by bureaucracy and red tape. Those delays were magnified by a fire prevention initiative from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) that went years without completing a single project. The Los Angeles fires are already projected to cause up to $150 billion in damage