Each of Bush's expectations represents a triumph of hope over evidence, not least because his speech did nothing whatever to diminish the continuing mismatch between his expansive political objectives and the inadequate means with which he has sought to achieve them.

Overall, the speech reflected a plan at war with itself as much as with the enemy.

In short, with Bush, it requires ignoring the prevailing evidence.

Fingerprint evidence has long been considered an infallible form of proof, powerful enough to support a criminal conviction even without any other evidence.

But when top experts manage to blow an important identification, our longstanding faith in fingerprints must be questioned.

Fingerprinting, unlike DNA evidence, currently lacks any valid statistical foundation.

This is gravely troubling.

The growing size of computer fingerprint databases makes this issue still more acute. As a database grows in size, the probability that a number of people will have strikingly similar prints also grows.

There is both good news and bad news in the flurry of reports describing the decline of American preeminence in science.

More research anywhere creates more possibilities for innovation everywhere.

The decline is not only relative. It is also absolute: American science is growing weaker.

Figures compiled by NPD Group, a market research firm, affirm what the marketplace has already established: video games based on Hollywood and book licenses are almost never big hits. Instead, year after year, games based on original characters and universes dominate the sales charts.

What do the prices of cheese and butter in Chicago have to do with how much you pay for milk at the local supermarket?

Just about everything. And the result is that you're paying more for a gallon of milk than ever before.

With the United States fighting protracted wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, its military faces a shortage of a basic necessity: ammunition.

Some fear that students' new pragmatism is detracting from their overall collegiate experience.

A printer from the 1500s magically catapulted into a print shop of the late 1700s would have found hand-operated, wooden presses little altered from his own time. Viewed from the standpoint of social practices, politics, and institutions, however, the change in communications was enormous.

What was this new public sphere? Part of the difficulty in defining it lies in the ambiguity of the word "public."

Publications weave invisible threads of connection among their readers. Once a newspaper circulates, for example, no one ever truly reads it alone.

Most complaints about the media are personal. Rupert Murdoch did this, Jayson Blair did that. But the most important -- and interesting -- questions are structural.

How can newspapers support increasingly expensive international coverage, when most keep losing readers?

How can a television station afford not to trumpet disasters and scandals on its local news, when competitors that do get higher ratings?

Does concentration of ownership really matter?

Is there any longer such a thing as a broad market for the news?

"The Creation of the Media" is so thick with detail and careful in nuance that it is completely convincing as a work of scholarship.