Mike Pilewski writes about life, politics and culture in the United States
The Pentagon announced yesterday that its special forces had killed Abu Sayyaf, a top Islamic State commander in Syria. There’d been a firefight at his compound. The special forces seized a substantial amount of useful information. Four years and two weeks ago, we were told the same things about Osama bin Laden. There were some serious holes in that story, … >>
You’ve got to love Michio Kaku. The smiling American physicist knows the answer to everything, and because he does, he appears in every single science documentary these days — at least those produced by the Discovery Channel. Kaku’s 2009–10 series Sci-Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, currently showing on German TV, underscores the extent to which science fiction inspires today’s … >>
That Barack Obama! You never know what he’s going to do next. One night, he’s cracking jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The next night, he tells us Osama bin Laden is dead. I have to offer my congratulations. Obama had promised to go after bin Laden, and he got him. I’m happy to see that the president can … >>
This column was originally written for Spotlight Online. As some of you may know, I write the Replay section you hear on Spotlight Audio each month. We present the voices of people who have been in the news and explain the language they use. The language we use when giving background to recent events is just as important. A few … >>
Here’s a little history quiz for you. Which war was the longest in American history? If you answered “Vietnam,” you’d have been right until about three weeks ago. US combat there officially lasted eight years and eight months. But this June, it was overtaken by Afghanistan, where fighting has gone on uninterrupted since October 2001. The arrival of this fact … >>
How lucky we are when our problems are trivial! Flying to Istanbul on Christmas Day, my only complaint was that Turkish Airlines had seated me next to a large, burly man instead of a lovely Czech supermodel. Had I instead been flying to Detroit that same day, I would have come close to being blown up. It was only a … >>
This time, all the TV networks carried the speech. That’s how important it was — the strategy so long in coming on how to win a war many consider unwinnable. Speaking at the prestigious West Point military academy, Barack Obama said that over the next six months, America would send another 30,000 troops to join the roughly 70,000 already in … >>