I was assigned by the State Department to interpret for the Baghdad Conference (to establish an interim government) and later to provide language support to both Barbara Bodine and retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the two highest officials in postwar Iraq. I didn't know how the experiment would turn out. But as I arrived in Baghdad, I really believed the United States had an efficient, well-studied plan to put Iraq together after toppling the Saddam regime.

What I witnessed in the year or so I spent helping U.S. officials on the ground in Iraq, and what I have seen more recently, has made me doubtful about our competence for nation building

How Do You Say Clueless?

THE Lord's Prayer written on a grain of rice is not better than the Lord's Prayer written on a piece of paper, but it is a lot more impressive. The same is true of Sony Bend's stealth-action game Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror

Large-Scale Action in a Tiny Package - New York Times

How could an outsider, someone who has not been bathed in the culture and mores of science, get it so right?

Writer Depicts Scientists Risking Glory for Truth and Truth for Glory - New York Times

"Find Me Guilty," Mr. Lumet's first feature film in seven years, catches him near the top of his game. Now 81, this master surveyor of the urban jungle still has the machinery of police work and courtroom ritual down cold. His skill at conveying the feel of federal offices, jail cells and the eateries where cops and criminals gather to shoot the breeze is so precise you can almost smell the paint on the walls and the food in the kitchen. Where it can, the screenplay he wrote with T. J. Mancini and Robert J. McCrea uses dialogue taken from court transcripts.

Thanks to "The Godfather," "GoodFellas," "The Sopranos" and their countless imitations, the characters in contemporary mob dramas are now such beloved cliches that they are almost like family. Or rather, they are cherished fantasy projections of ourselves in a shadow version of a society obsessed with family values and corporate upward mobility.

Find Me Guilty

ON FEBRUARY 24, a tectonic shift took place in the shadowy world of special operations. It was an event years in the making, but it probably wouldn't have happened at all if not for the al Qaeda attacks on September 11.

Here Come the Marines

Cameras and telephones are coming together—and bringing people together—in ways that can shape society

A Thousand Words

Part of the trouble of being stuck in this job (or seeming to be stuck, or self-defeatingly sticking) is that the number of possibilities once I leave are daunting.

How do I overcome the inertia?

The Democrats are in disarray.

DISARRAY THIS

You'd swear after watching this year's Oscar night tribute montage to film noir that no one in the Academy knows much about the genre that lit a million cigarettes, rolled a million beads of sweat, and filled a million alleys with impenetrable shadow. But the studio libraries, particularly Fox, keep belching up the classics, and the cliched rules we think we know don't always apply.

Fallen Angel by Michael Atkinson

A few months ago, I attended "Polyamory for Non-Primary Partners,"

Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino