What We're Reading

Hello Material Supporters,

Here is what we’re reading this week:

Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes is reading “Tracking Lions, Myth, and Wilderness in Samburu,” by his uncle Jon Turk, which is a “provocative look at the vital connection between human beings, the natural world and meaningful knowledge.” He is also reading “The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground,” by Jeffrey Ostler.

Executive editor Natalie Orpett read about the new reports out of the White House and the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security describing the ways in which climate change poses a threat to national security, and she's looking forward to hearing more (including on Lawfare in the days to come!) She's also listening to the podcast Wind of Change, which tells the truly bizarre story of the 1990 power ballad of the same name. It explores the theory that the song was actually written not by the heavy metal band The Scorpions, but by none other than the CIA.

Publisher and Chief Operating Officer David Priess has been binging the podcast “The Past, The Promise, The Presidency,” hosted by the excellent Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, Dr. Sharron Conrad, and Dr. Jeffrey Engel. The first season's episodes—which generally analyze one commander in chief at a time, focusing on how that presidency intersected with the country's troubled and difficult history of race relations—contain plenty of surprises even for fans of American history.

Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic is reading through the Facebook Papers—the enormous pile of reporting from a range of outlets built around damning documents shared with the press by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. There’s far too much for even the most intrepid reader to follow, but she recommends this piece in Wired by Gilad Edelman, reviewing what the documents show about how Facebook employees think the company should fix its many problems.

Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson is reading Politico’s recent expose on the ongoing investigation into Havana Syndrome and suspected directed energy attacks on U.S. diplomats as well as an excellent essay and accompanying set of photographs in the New York Times focusing on political and cultural divides in modern-day Israel.

Managing Editor Jacob Schulz is reading a profile of the mercurial Evergrande CEO by Katrina Northrop and a fascinating story about Vienese art museums using Only Fans in order to subvert Facebook's nudity censorship rules.

Fellow in Cybersecurity Law Alvaro Marañon is reading an engineer's blog post about the time when a script error led to the death of "10,000 phones in South America."

Associate Editor Rohini Kurup is reading an article in the New York Times titled “A C.I.A. Fighter, a Somali Bomb Maker, and a Faltering Shadow War.” The article looks at the U.S. mission in Somalia, where al-Shabab are at their strongest in years, through the stories of two men on the opposite sides of the fight.

Associate Editor Bryce Klehm is reading a New Yorker article titled, “Who Gets to Escape the Taliban” by Jane Ferguson. Ferguson, a special correspondent for PBS Newshour, provides a vivid and moving description of the Kabul airport during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Lawfare’s Quote of the Week: From “The Sussmann Indictment, Human Source Handling, and the FBI’s Declining FISA Numbers” by Peter Strzok: “In other words, don’t imagine that the national security damage to the FBI from the Trump administration has been fixed. Don’t lull yourself into thinking that legacy investigations are limited to the past and aren’t causing present harm. The longer they continue—and Durham’s endeavors have now far outpaced the length of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation—the longer any administrative punishment lies in abeyance waiting for the criminal investigations to conclude, and the greater the damage to the FBI’s ability and willingness to investigate the powerful.”

From the Lawfare Vault: Oct. 24, 2018, “Government Shifts its Rationale for Holding Al-Afghani at Guantanamo” by Harry Graver

Thank you!