Within the span of a few decades, the United States has utterly transformed its military or at least the military that is actively fighting. This has taken place with little fanfare and little public scrutiny. But without any conscious plan, I have seen some of the evolution firsthand. One of my early books, Black Hawk Down, was about a disastrous U.S. Special Ops mission in Somalia. Another, Guests of the Ayatollah, about the Iran hostage crisis, detailed an abortive but pivotal Special Ops rescue mission. U.S. Special Operators were involved in the successful hunt for the drug lord Pablo Escobar, the subject of Killing Pablo, and they conducted the raid that ended the career of Osama bin Laden, the subject of The Finish. By seeking out dramatic military missions, I have chronicled the movement of Special Ops from the wings to center stage.
Big ships, strategic bombers, nuclear submarines, flaring missiles, mass armies—these still represent the conventional imagery of American power, and they absorb about 98 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. Special Ops forces, in contrast, are astonishingly small. And yet they are now responsible for much of the military’s on-the-ground engagement in real or potential trouble spots around the world. Special Ops is lodged today under the Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, a “combatant command” that reports directly to the secretary of defense. It has acquired its central role despite initially stiff resistance from the conventional military branches, and without most of us even noticing.
It happened out of necessity. We now live in an open-ended world of “competition short of conflict,” to use a phrase from military doctrine. “There’s the continuum of absolute peace, which has never existed on the planet, up to toe-to-toe full-scale warfare,” General Raymond A. “Tony” Thomas, a former head of SOCOM, told me last year. “Then there’s that difficult in-between space.”
Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe is a landscape park in Kassel, Germany. The area of the park is 2.4 square kilometers (590 acres), making it the largest European hillside park, and the second-largest park on a hill slope in the world.Construction of the Bergpark, or “mountain park”, began in 1689 at the behest of the Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel and took about 150 years. The park is open to the public today. Since 2013, it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Bad Wilhelmshöhe [de], a Stadtteil of Kassel in northern Hesse, is situated west of the city center at the foot of the Habichtswald hill range. It is also known for Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe station on the Hanover–Würzburg high-speed railway line.
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An image from Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe Kassel Germany
To get a handle on what’s happened to pickup trucks, it really helps to use a human body for scale.
In some nerdy Internet circles — specifically, bike and pedestrian advocacy — it has become trendy to take a selfie in front of the bumper of random neighborhood Silverados. Among the increasingly popular heavy-duty models, the height of the truck’s front end may reach a grown man’s shoulders or neck. When you involve children in this exercise it starts to become really disturbing. My four-year-old son, for example, barely cleared the bumper on a lifted F-250 we came across in a parking lot last summer.
Vehicles of this scale saddle their drivers with huge front and rear blind zones that make them perilous to operate in crowded areas. Even car guys have been sounding the alarm about the mega-truck trend recently. A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Neil complained about his close encounter in a parking lot with a 2020 GMC Sierra HD Denali: “The domed hood was at forehead level. The paramedics would have had to extract me from the grille with a spray hose.”
Security researchers have recently discovered a botnet with a novel defense against takedowns. Normally, authorities can disable a botnet by taking over its command-and-control server. With nowhere to go for instructions, the botnet is rendered useless. But over the years, botnet designers have come up with ways to make this counterattack harder. Now the content-delivery network Akamai has reported on a new method: a botnet that uses the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. Since the blockchain is globally accessible and hard to take down, the botnet’s operators appear to be safe.
It’s best to avoid explaining the mathematics of Bitcoin’s blockchain but to understand the colossal implications here, you need to understand one concept. Blockchains are a type of “distributed ledger”: a record of all transactions since the beginning, and everyone using the blockchain needs to have access to—and reference—a copy of it. What if someone puts illegal material in the blockchain? Either everyone has a copy of it, or the blockchain’s security fails.
To be fair, not absolutely everyone who uses a blockchain holds a copy of the entire ledger. Many who buy cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t bother using the ledger to verify their purchase. Many don’t actually hold the currency outright, and instead, trust an exchange to do the transactions and hold the coins. But people need to continually verify the blockchain’s history on the ledger for the system to be secure. If they stopped, then it would be trivial to forge coins. That’s how the system works.
Kraków, written in English as Krakow and traditionally known as Cracow, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Province, the city dates back to the 7th century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 and has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, economic, cultural and artistic life. Cited as one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, its Old Town has declared the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in the world.
The city has grown from a Stone Age settlement to Poland’s second-most-important city. It began as a hamlet on Wawel Hill and was reported as a busy trading centre of Central Europe in 965. With the establishment of new universities and cultural venues at the emergence of the Second Polish Republic in 1918 and throughout the 20th century, Kraków reaffirmed its role as a major national academic and artistic centre. The city has a population of about 780,000, with approximately 8 million additional people living within a 100 km (62 mi) radius of its main square.
If you know anything about the Raven bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, then you know that it charges more for books than Amazon. Advertising higher prices is an unlikely strategy for any business, but Danny Caine, Raven’s owner, has an M.F.A., not an M.B.A., and he talks openly with customers about why his books cost as much as they do. Two years ago, he took that conversation to social media, using the store’s Twitter account to explain why the Raven was charging twenty-six ninety-nine for a hardcover book that a customer had seen online for fifteen dollars. “When we order direct from publishers, we get a wholesale discount of 46% off the cover price,” Caine wrote. “Our cost for that book from the publishers would be $14.57. If we sold it for $15, we’d make . . . 43 cents.” Caine estimated that, with an inventory of some ten thousand books in the store, on a profit of less than fifty cents a book, the Raven could afford to stay open for about six days.
Amazon has a much larger inventory—not only of books but of other goods with much higher profit margins—as well as many other revenue streams. The company can afford to take a loss on books. “If you’ve ever wondered why it seems like ‘there are no bookstores anymore’ or why retail businesses keep closing in your downtown, this is it,” Caine wrote. The Raven can’t afford losses like Amazon, but almost every dollar that the store makes stays in Kansas: after the publisher’s cut, half of every book sold goes directly to employee wages; the other half goes to rent, marketing, and other operating costs, including store maintenance, the Web site, and food and veterinary care for the Raven’s most famous employees, the cats Dashiell (as in Hammett) and Ngaio (as in Marsh).
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Amazon can afford to take a loss on books. Small independent bookstores cannot. Illustration by Owen D. Pomery; Source photograph by Danny Caine
On a sunny day in early 2017, Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Inc.’s chief executive officer, returned to his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, in West Bengal, to speak before 3,500 students. Welcomed as the “rock star” leader of the “world’s most innovative company,” he reminisced about skipping classes and meeting his college girlfriend—now his wife. He also pitched Google to the soon-to-be-graduates in attendance. How many wanted to work there, the interviewer asked. Hundreds of hands went up. “Wow, maybe we should open a campus in Kharagpur,” Pichai joked.
As far as feeder schools go, it doesn’t get much better for Google than the network of 23 ultracompetitive, government-funded IITs. Every year hundreds of their graduates join the world’s biggest tech companies. In 2003, when the school system celebrated its 50th anniversary, Bill Gates delivered a keynote speech praising grads who’d come to work at Microsoft Corp. over the years, noting that the company had, in turn, invested more money in the IITs than in any other institution outside the U.S. and the U.K.
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Amit Jatav at home as he tried to continue his studies with his university, IIT Delhi, going online. Behind him is a portrait of B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit thinker, and activist who led the drafting of the Constitution of India and is responsible for the fight against caste discrimination in the country.
Photographer: Anshika Varma for Bloomberg Businessweek
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Special Ops Illustrations by Mike McQuade
Photographer: Sean Proctor/Bloomberg
