Edward Snowden, by his own account, grew up as a “shape-shifter.” His father worked for the Coast Guard, his mother for the Maryland state courts. But his parents’ appearances in Snowden’s new memoir, Permanent Record, are fleeting and superficial. The more enduring influences on his life—his sociocultural parental units, as it were—were the civil service...
Category: Reviews
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Richard Holbrooke’s Empty Legacy for 2020 Democrats
It all began so promisingly. Inspired by the idealism of President John F. Kennedy, young Richard Holbrooke, a gangly 21-year-old graduate of Brown, joined the Foreign Service in 1962. The State Department assigned him to the rural southern tip of Vietnam. In a region where the South Vietnamese army and its American advisers claimed to...
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Who Is Watching the Watchers?
That perennial question in the Age of Surveillance was projected by visual artist provocateur Robin Bell on a most appropriate canvas: the headquarters of the FBI in downtown Washington.