David Headley is not on trial in Chicago's Everett McKinley Dirksen federal courthouse. But he is the star of the proceedings, the chief witness against a man who was once his friend. There is nothing ordinary about the case: it kicks off from Headley's confessed and key role as a perpetrator of one horrific terrorist attack — the three-day November 2008 assault on Mumbai — and details his part in planning another incident in Denmark, all in ...

Agricultural policy is not sexy. You probably don't know the intricacies of "loan deficiency payments" or "base acreage," and you probably don't care. This was once an agrarian nation, but now there's a less than 1% chance that you're a farmer, and if you are, you're probably part time; the average farm family gets 82% of its income from nonfarm sources. We're not a people of the soil anymore, and for most of us, our eyes glaze over when we ...

Supreme Court confirmation hearings are often dismissed as a kind of ritualized theater that reveals little about the judicial philosophy of nominees. But this stereotype is frequently wrong. From David Souter to John Roberts, many nominees have tended to reveal more of themselves than they expect. Judge Sonia Sotomayor may have been something of an exception. Like previous nominees, during her confirmation hearings she displayed some aspects of her judicial philosophy — but perhaps not all of ...

What would you write if you could write absolutely anything? This is the question that, as a reader, one imagined David Foster Wallace facing. Whereas ordinary authors resorted to the standard tricks of the trade--write what you know, look deep into your soul, whatever--Wallace seemed to have no earthly constraints. He knew everything and could look into anybody's soul he wanted to. Any writer in America would have killed for his talent, but the man to whom it belonged killed ...

You may not like Congressman Paul Ryan's budget plan, but you must admit that it's courageous. You simply must. By order of the Washington establishment, you may question whether Ryan's plan is sensible or humane or even remotely honest, but you have to confess that it is undeniably an extraordinary act of bravery, or else pundits will beat the confession out of you with swoony prose. To New York Times columnist David Brooks, Ryan's 73-page budget outline ...

For all its reputation as the city of tomorrow, a place that will marry capitalism and cool as effortlessly as New York City or London, the city of Shanghai, truth be told, is not a particularly pleasant place during the summer. It's a steambath, and when the occasional typhoon blows through, it will rain for three days nonstop. Many of the streets simply reek as garbage rots in the oppressive heat. Most people, if they have a choice, try to ...

Much like this week's splashy action picture Source Code, Trust features a story line about people at the mercy of technology. But there's no science-fiction component to director David Schwimmer's grim story of Internet-based pedophilia, and there's no aspect of it that doesn't feel painfully plausible. We're in the here and now, watching pretty 14-year-old Annie sink deeper and deeper into electronic quicksand. She has a new online boyfriend, Charlie, and while she takes breaks for meals, ...

Two months after the writer David Foster Wallace killed himself, his agent, accompanied by his widow, went into his garage office to look through his papers. It was Thanksgiving weekend, 2008, and the weather was cold and gray in Claremont, Calif. On Wallace's desk they found a neat stack of around 200 pages containing several chapters of a novel called The Pale King. His agent, Bonnie Nadell, knew he'd been working on it. A lot of people did: ...

As the military action against Libya to give teeth to U.N. Security Resolution 1973 began, one question kept nagging away: Why, precisely, were the governments of Britain and France in the lead? Why were their armed forces taking part in the military action, and why had their diplomats done the grunt work in the negotiations that led to the adoption of Resolution 1973? It is not an easy question to answer. British Prime Minister David Cameron said that ...

Broadening the number of health care professionals who can administer vaccine, New York Gov. David Paterson issued a sweeping executive order Thursday officially declaring a state of emergency due to the increase in H1N1 cases, including 75 H1N1-related deaths in New York state.