This issue: November 12, 2012 (Vol. 18, No. 09)

Mysteries of Benghazi

BY STEPHEN F. HAYES

November 6 is not only Election Day, it's also the eight-week anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

 Regardless of which candidate wins, the American people deserve answers to the many unanswered questions about the attack—and the events that preceded and followed it. The Benghazi debacle is a drama in three parts: the lack of security before the attacks, the flaccid response during the attacks, and the misleading narrative after the attacks. There are unanswered questions about each part. Here are some of the most important.

Too Charitable

North Korea’s favorite philanthropists.

BY ETHAN EPSTEIN

North Koreans have been starving for nearly two decades. The worst period of famine, from 1994 to 1998, killed some three and a half million people, and chronic food shortages have persisted since then, with untold lives lost. Death tolls can understate human suffering, too: The millions who manage to survive chronic hunger still bear scars for life. One North Korean defector that I interviewed in Seoul several years ago, who had been a child in the mid-1990s, stood no taller than five feet—though judging by the size of his hands and his head, he should have been a much bigger man.

Last Rights

You can have the ‘right to die’—once you surrender all the others

BY SAM SCHULMAN

In 1990, as I was nursing a mortally ill magazine, I got a call from a literary agent. “I have a great idea for a book. Your dad [a neurologist at the University of Chicago] could do the medical part, and you could write it. The book is called How We Die. Let me explain it.”

I told him not to bother with the explanation—I got it instantly. I saw the book in my mind and understood why it was such a brilliant idea. I phoned my father with the good news about our new family project. An unworldly man, Dad would surely be puzzled by the notion that a book about the physiology of dying would be a bestseller.

Wars of Words

The story behind the stories about Webster’s Third.

BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN

Of the making of books, Ecclesiastes informs us, there is no end. But of some books, perhaps, there should never have been a beginning. One such book, or so many believed when it first appeared, was Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. When published in 1961, it was mocked by the New York Times, mauled by Life, dismantled by the Atlantic, and (in the Mafia sense) whacked by the New Yorker, which turned loose Dwight Macdonald, a famous hit man of the day, to do the job. Other, lesser media piled on, agreeing that the new dictionary was a grave ...

Chains of Love

Geoffrey Norman on the power of a power tool

BY GEOFFREY NORMAN

Hurricane Sandy showed Vermont some mercy, where Irene did not.  The storm passed to the west, and we got a lot of rain and enough wind to knock out power to a few thousand people, including, 

to my absolute nonastonishment .  .  . me.  The pine trees in our neighborhood fall over in a faint if the weatherman so much as mentions strong winds.

A couple of hours before the storm reached peak strength and before we lost power, my wife left for a business appointment, then shortly returned and reported that there was a tree ...

Phantom Maecenas

The Scrapbook notes, with some amusement, that George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars franchise, sold his lucrative Lucasfilm enterprise last week to the Disney Company, which announced in turn that it intends to revive and extend the Star Wars saga. We leave it to the experts to judge whether this cinematic/economic event is a cultural landmark, or a sign that the Disney empire (like Lucasfilm) has finally run out of fresh ideas.

What attracted our attention was Lucas’s announcement that he will devote a substantial portion of his $4 billion windfall to philanthropy, for which he is being showered with praise, and which is described by Lucas in the usual string of phrases ...