Paul Boutin

Fred Kaplan does the math, comparing the latest military budget proposal to those of past wartime years. He also breaks down what the biggest chunks of Bush’s half trillion are for.

Missile defense is now the military’s single largest money sponge. The Pentagon’s director of testing says the program has not yet come close to proving its effectiveness. Officials at the Missile Defense Agency acknowledge that the architecture for a multilayered defense system has yet to be worked out. Several scientific panels (including several apolitical ones) have concluded that the program’s whole mission lies beyond the realm of real science. Bush is set to deploy the first 20 antimissile missiles by next year.

Look, I’m still a peacenik, but how about sending some more Kevlar body armor pads to Iraq first?

In summer 2001, Cory Doctorow told me about his next novel, which would take Frances Cairncross’ The Death of Distance to its logical extreme: In the future, people are aligned not by nationalities, but by time zones. I loved the idea (I work on Eastern time from San Francisco myself), and assigned Cory a nonfiction Wired article for which he hunted down a set of real people strung around the globe, but all working in sync to the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Our best find: Happy hour in Manhattan and Madrid occur at the same time. Now all we need are the transfer booths.

Two years and some later, Cory’s novel - Eastern Standard Tribe - is finally available. If you liked 0wnz0red, you’ll probably like EST too. It’s less science fiction, more supercaffeinated extrapolation (”…expialidocious!”) of today’s always-on lifestyle crowd, of which Cory has plenty of firsthand experience. The narrator’s dilemma is spelled out at the start: His friends have committed him to a mental hospital as part of a plot. Except there’s the nagging suspicion he may really be going nuts. As with a Vonnegut novel, it’s the gradual filling in of details over the next 300 pages by an unreliable narrator that makes it an engaging read.

Found in an NYT article on law firms hiring inside counsel to advise them on their own business: “This may not be quite like shipping coal to Newcastle, but it is akin to … perhaps a software firm taking on a programmer to review the work of other programmers.” Software firms hire programmers to review the work of other programmers all the time. They’re given titles such as Software Quality Engineer.

Don’t let it spoil the story for you, though - it’s an interesting read about how law firms no longer presume they can take care of their own lawyering.