The July 2010 Issue

It's been a busy month. By far the single most spectacular development was a Rolling Stone article on US General Stanley McChrystal, penned by a relatively young and inexperienced reporter. His revelations threatened, briefly, to derail US policy on Afghanistan, brought an accomplished senior military officer's career to a screeching halt, and sparked a heated media debate on journalistic ground rules and ethics.  Current Intelligence tracked the discussion at The Editors' Desk and in The Agenda, our house blog. We also republished H-Net book reviews that, we think, lend much-needed historical depth to the issue.

Healthy reminders that not all that's newsworthy straddles the Durand line: Felix Ilmonti's essay on North Korean sanctions evasion, Deputy Editor Eric Randolph does background on the most lethal terrorist incident on Indian soil since the Mumbai attacks, and Contributing Editor Charli Carpenter spells out her manifesto for human security analysis. 

Our columnists, as always, look to the big picture: The Green Zone's Kenneth Payne compares civil-military relations in the US and in the United Kingdom, and the chaos of the web to the peace of an Oxford research library; our own Quiet American, Jon Western, currently somewhere between Brussels and Rome, discusses Israeli-Turkish relations and regional posturing.

Finally, proving that Current Intelligence isn't just another pretty face in the geopolitics department, information and media theorist Greg J. Smith introduces his new column, Some Assembly Required, where he'll be exploring "emerging technologies and incomplete futures". We look forward to Greg bringing some balance to the force...

Is Twitter a form of literature? As an experiment, we collected a sample of tweets on the BP oil spill, now into its third month. It may not be Shakespeare, but it is, at least, colorful, and it tells us a lot about what the twittering masses think of the despoliation of the Gulf of Mexico. At the risk of seeming frivolous, we also polled our staff, contributors and friends on their summer reading - a surprisingly eclectic bookshelf filled with comic books and memoirs, with Russian literature and Afghan history, with baseball, vampires, and other spooks. 

Enjoy.