Justin Peters

War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire by Sarah Ellison Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304 pp. On July 31, 2007, the barbarians finally made it over the gate. On that day, media titan Rupert Murdoch sealed a $5.6 billion deal to buy Dow Jones, parent company of the […]

Why Americans play Powerball.

Poker has arrived, again, after a long period of dormancy, and it’s not just for riverboat gamblers anymore. Indeed, players from all fields are finding success on the felt–teenagers, movie stars, recent immigrants. But arguably the most successful newcomers are the alumni of an obscure strategy card game called Magic: The Gathering. Magic alumni claimed […]

Meet Prudence Bushnell, the petite former ambassador to Guatemala and Kenya and current dean of the Foreign Service Institute’s School of Leadership and Management. From her office on the fourth floor of Building E on the Foreign Service Institute’s spacious Arlington, Va., campus, Bushnell and her staff are responsible for training those tapped by the […]

Conspicuously missing, especially in an age of terror, is any public edifice commemorating the sacrifices–including the ultimate ones–made by the men and women of America’s intelligence services. Instead, spooks and spies must make do with the International Spy Museum, a techno-slick for-profit enterprise that opened a few years ago among Washington’s downtown tourist warrens, right […]

There are about 15 people in attendance at the press conference, most of who seem to be the authors’ friends and colleagues. They listen attentively to Fetzer’s theories and nod along to his frequent digressions on the press (Logic and evidence are not the strong suit for the American media) or John F. Kennedy’s assassination […]

We’re sitting at a table in the back of Chef Geoff’s, a restaurant in downtown Washington which functions as the de facto campaign headquarters for Monroe’s long-shot bid. It’s 6:30 p.m., right before the dinner rush, and the clubby oaken-paneled restaurant is mostly empty, with pockets of early-bird elderly scattered around the dining room. Monroe […]