What Really Happened in the Tim Hunt Affair and Why It Matters In 1983, the British biochemist Timothy Hunt discovered cyclins, a family of proteins that help regulate the life of cells. Eighteen years later, in 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Between June 8 and June 10 of this year, [Read more…]
Media
Defeat in the "Information Battle Space" (National Review May 17, 2007)
Media, Old Articles/Archive
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The Western media, wittingly or not, are aiding our enemies Islamabad — The week I was in Afghanistan this winter, two big stories hit the international press. The first involved the publication of photographs of German NATO troops apparently “desecrating” the remains of dead Afghans. The second was about the accidental killing of up to two hundred [Read more…]
When the Fix is In (National Review, Sept 10, 2007)
Media, Old Articles/Archive
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Fixers, interpreters, and reporting from Iraq A British colleague of mine was sent by his newspaper to Iraq in 2005, just before the July 7 bombings in London. After that attack, his editor asked him to canvass “ordinary Iraqis” for their reaction. The resulting article reported that all but one of the twelve Baghdadis my [Read more…]
Good News From Afghanistan? (Commentary Magazine, July/August 2014)
Latest Articles, Media, Military/Defence, Reportage/Features, South Asia
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On the Unheralded Transformation of Kabul “Everybody knows the war is over./ Everybody knows the good guys lost.” -Leonard Cohen Everyone knows that there has been no progress and no development in Afghanistan, that the West’s efforts there since the overthrow of the Taliban have been a gigantic waste of blood and treasure. Everyone knows that the [Read more…]
Decline and Fall of the BBC? (Commentary Magazine April 2013)
Latest Articles, Media
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Admired around the world, and nowhere more than in the upper reaches of the American media, the British Broadcasting Corporation has long enjoyed the unstinting support of Britain’s metropolitan media elite, whose views it both forms and reflects. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher considered it institutionally hostile to her person as well as to her agenda. [Read more…]
The Al Jazeera producer Rosie Garthwaite draws on her experiences as well as those those of other battle-hardened foreign correspondents for her new book It is a dusty but relatively cool Saturday afternoon in the Qatari capital of Doha when I meet Rosie Garthwaite at the headquarters of Al Jazeera English. The news studio where she [Read more…]
Underrated: Theodore Dalrymple (Standpoint Sept. 2011)
Interviews/Profiles, Media
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Regular readers of Theodore Dalrymple will not have been surprised by the looting that spread through London and then to other English cities in early August. Indeed, one of the fascinating and appalling aspects of these disturbances, beyond the gleeful contempt for the law shown by the looters, and the complacency of the police who allowed [Read more…]
The WikiLeaks War on America (Commentary Jan 2011)
Essays/Book Reviews, Media, Military/Defence
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The indefinable international organization known as WikiLeaks was relatively unknown between its setting up in 2006 and the April 2010 premiere it staged at the National Press Club in Washington of the “Collateral Murder” video—a selection of stolen and decrypted gun-camera footage that purportedly shows the unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists by [Read more…]