It’s early in the season for the new anchor of the storied CBS Evening News, but with three regular broadcasts, Tony Dokoupil has fouled out every night. That doesn’t look good for the third-place network news show. Breaking news can always disrupt a carefully planned remote newscast that is out of the studio and on […]
It’s not unusual to discover, while writing a non fiction project, that the most minor of characters deserve their own book and more . This week as part of my own book research I have discovered a forgotten age of fighting sail officer who is likely worth a biography or a novel or even a […]
Be subtle! Be subtle! And use your spies for every kind of business. Sūnzǐ 孙子 (Sun Tzu) The Art of War When nations are in a shooting war, they use spies. When nations are in a trade war, they use spies. On Wednesday, April 2, 2025, US President Donald Trump declared a trade war on […]
(long read) When US President Donald Trump is not demanding that Canada become “the 51st state” he muses about redrawing a border, a border that is defined by treaties dating back to 1783. In mid-March Trump, in a media scrum outside the White House, talked about redrawing the border. In Trump’s derailed train of […]
Fifty years ago, in 1970, two books, one written and edited in the United States, the second in Canada, both gathered prominent writers to predict what the year 2020 would be like. As one might expect, no one got it entirely right. There were hints of things to come. Now it’s 2020. The world is […]
In the year AD 2100, an evil Dictator rules the United States. He maintains power through the clever use of advanced science and pyschology. And he is backed by a dedicated military clique…. From Robert A. Heinlein, the dean of space-age fiction, comes this thrilling novel of a soldier who dare to defy Authority who […]
Back in the 1980s when I first embarked on historical investigations, the US State Department had its own analog, paper-based Wiki that covered almost every diplomatic dispatch going back centuries, millions of three by five inch index cards. And each told a story. It was amazing to go through those old cards to find what […]