The Atlantic

Eighteen months after former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld retreated from his post under heavy criticism for, among other things, mishandling the invasion of Iraq and legitimizing torture as an interrogation technique, some Washington insiders are revisiting his strategies and tactics.

Notably, resurrecting Rumsfeld's idea - a comprehensive plan to overhaul the military - hasn't been reintroduced into the public dialog by die-hard neo-conservatives. The project is being led by a faction of security-obsessed Democrats.

Several weeks ago, military analyst Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution published a 60-page report, "Unfinished Business: U.S. Overseas Military presence in the 21st Century," which recommended that the next president return to Rumsfeld's "chief intellectual and policy accomplishment during his six-year tenure at the Pentagon.  read more »

"It's really easy to get killed in Iraq," says Phillip Robertson, a freelancer who covered the war for Salon and wrote the introduction to the book Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq.

"They want to kill you. All you have to do is give them a chance and somebody will kill you or kidnap you." Mr. Robertson had his own near-kidnap experience, but he managed to get away. His driver's car was totaled, but Salon paid for a replacement. "No one has ever been killed because of me," he says. "And I'm very, very proud of that. There have been repercussions because of my stories but I can look you in the eye and say no one has been seriously hurt because of me."  read more »

This month's Atlantic cover story by Nicholas Carr which asks the pressing question "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?"

After examining several ways in which our brains have been rewired by our dependence on the web, Mr. Carr notes:

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed...  read more »

In a bit of marital stunt journalism, Slate's David Plotz and The Atlantic's Hanna Rosin decided to spend a whole day 15 feet apart and report on their experiences. (They also let Slate V's camera' follow them.)  read more »

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg—who joined the magazine from The New Yorker last year—has started a blog.

His first entry, which features an endearingly retro Public Enemy reference as its title, begins with the self-effacing words, "This is almost certainly a mistake." Well, it can't be as big a mistake as championing the invasion of Iraq relying (according to Harper's Ken Silverstein), "heavily on administration sources and war hawks (and in at least one crucial case, a fabricator)."

In March, Goldberg offered a mea culpa on Slate:

I wanted very much for the liberation of Iraq to succeed, for many reasons. I wasn't sure there was an alternative to Saddam's removal, in part because the sanctions regime was collapsing. I believed that Saddam's nuclear ambitions posed an almost immediate threat to national security. I believed that Saddam was a supporter of terrorism.  read more »