Clyde Haberman

At respected research centers in the United States and other countries, scientists have spent much of their professional lives in drug rehabilitation. It is not because they themselves struggle with addiction. What they are trying to rehabilitate are the drugs. Their focus is on mind-altering compounds that fell far from grace nearly half a century […]

In a sense, this is a “Back to the Future” presidential campaign, with candidates revisiting a specific time in the past to explain — and often lament — where the country is today. That period is often the 1990s, during Bill Clinton’s White House watch. It was when stricter anti-crime measures and looser financial regulations […]

As the police and prosecutors in Brooklyn tell it, Kahton Andersonboarded a bus on March 20, a .357 revolver at his side. For whatever reason — some gang grudge, apparently — he pulled out the gun and fired at his intended target. Only his aim was rotten. The bullet struck and killed a passenger who […]

With global temperatures rising inexorably, some scientists and national security theorists have pondered cooling things down by tinkering mechanically with the planet’s climate. The goal of this geoengineering would be to create an effect not unlike when clouds suddenly block the sun and chill a warm afternoon. Average surface temperatures might be held down by […]

Reflecting on baseball attendance, the philosopher Yogi Berraobserved that “if people don’t want to come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?” He could have said much the same thing about the American electorate. If voters don’t want to go to the polls, what is going to stop them, too? Often enough, […]

United States military operations in Afghanistan, now in their 15th year, are routinely described as America’s longest war. For overseas combat, that is true. But nothing tops the domestic “war on drugs” that an American president declared more than four decades ago. The casualty rate has been exceedingly high. Nearly 44,000 Americans a year — […]

On Wednesday, the Army is scheduled to begin two months of training exercises across the American Southwest. If the past is a reasonable guide, some on the outer reaches of the far right are bound to recycle warnings that martial law is at hand. Conspiracy theorists were singularly imaginative after these war games, code-named Jade […]

The second half of the 1960s was a boom time for nightmarish visions of what lay ahead for humankind. In 1966, for example, a writer named Harry Harrison came out with a science fiction novel titled “Make Room! Make Room!” Sketching a dystopian world in which too many people scrambled for too few resources, the […]

The notion that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” is credited to the American economist Paul Romer, who offered the thought a decade ago in a discussion about education. Mr. Romer’s observation has since been echoed in a variety of contexts. It could be applied as well to stewardship of this country’s food […]