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DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
Broken News
8/26/2008 12:00:00 AM
DID DEMOCRATS WASTE FIRST DAY? blared a graphic beneath Larry King's chin. The Monday-night program of the Democratic National Convention had ended a couple of hours earlier, and King wanted the assembled pundits to tell him whether the party has mishandled its big event. The question is rich with irony. Precisely because of the pundits, who can even tell what the Democrats did on their first day, much less decide how well or badly they did it?
ANTHRAX
The Case Still Isn’t Closed
Michael Isikoff 8/9/2008 12:00:00 AM
When the FBI publicly branded the late Dr. Bruce Ivins as the anthrax killer, it unsealed court affidavits suggesting a possible motive for the mailing to one target: NBC anchor Tom Brokaw. According to the affidavits, Ivins was angry about repeated Freedom of Information Act requests from Gary Matsumoto, identified as "an investigative journalist who worked for NBC News" who was looking into Ivins's work on an anthrax vaccine. "Tell Matsumoto to kiss my ass," the affidavit says Ivins wrote in an Aug. 28, 2001, e-mail, noting that was "weeks" before the Sept. 18, 2001, anthrax mailing addressed to Brokaw. But Matsumoto told NEWSWEEK the FBI never interviewed him as part of its investigation. If it had, he says, he could have told them he'd actually left NBC News five years earlier. At the time he was bombarding Ivins's lab with FOIA requests, he was employed by ABC. "They're trying to connect dots that don't connect," he said.
TECHNOLOGY
Not Quite HAL 9000, But It Vacuums
Katie Baker 8/9/2008 12:00:00 AM
MIT robotics professor Rodney Brooks helped bring about a paradigm shift in robotics in the late 1980s when he advocated a move away from top-down programming (which required complete control of the robot's environment) toward a biologically inspired model that helped robots navigate dynamic, constantly changing surroundings on their own. His breakthroughs paved the way for Roomba, the vacuuming robot disc that uses multiple sensors to adapt to different floor types and avoid obstalces in its path. (Brooks is chief technology officer and cofounder of Roomba's parent company, iRobot.) Brooks talked to NEWSWEEK's Katie Baker about the challenges involved in creating robots that can interact in social settings. Excerpts:
POLITICS
The Story Is Out
Mark Hosenball 8/8/2008 12:00:00 AM
Bloggers and journalism pundits have been intensely debating the issue for days. But on Friday, ABC News took the plunge by becoming the first mainstream media outlet to go big on the John Edwards extramarital-affair story. ABC's investigative team of producer Rhonda Schwartz and Brian Ross posted a Web version of their story that accuses the former U.S. senator of "repeatedly" lying during his unsuccessful recent presidential bid about his relationship with 44-year-old Rielle Hunter, a filmmaker and sometime campaign aide. The story says that Edwards now has given ABC an interview, to be broadcast Friday night on "World News Tonight" and "Nightline," in which Edwards acknowledges the affair, but says that he "did not love her."
PSYCHOLOGY
When Life Is Like a TV Show
Jesse Ellison 8/2/2008 12:00:00 AM
As a director of psychiatrics at New York's Bellevue Hospital Center, Joel Gold has seen thousands of delusional patients. But a few years ago, he began noticing a different sort of paranoia: young white men who believed they were the subjects of their own reality-TV shows. Some, says Gold, who with his brother has written a preliminary paper and hopes to author a larger study, seemed pleased by their roles—excited by the anticipated million-dollar payout. Others were tormented. One came to New York to check whether the World Trade Center had actually fallen—believing 9/11 to be an elaborate plot twist in his personal storyline. Another came to climb the Statue of Liberty, believing that he'd be reunited with his high-school girlfriend at the top, and finally be released from the "show."
MIDDLE EAST
Jerusalem Up Against the Wall
Kevin Peraino 8/2/2008 12:00:00 AM
Ghassan Abu Tir's favorite television series was a Turkish soap opera called "Noor." The 22-year-old East Jerusalem hard hat rarely missed an episode. The show's setting—a luxurious villa along the Bosporus—is about as far from cramped and conservative Jerusalem as one can get. Some evenings, the Palestinian backhoe driver would sit with his brother on the balcony of their grandparents' stone house, smoking L&Ms and trying to figure out how he could afford his own villa. The numbers never added up. Building a house and buying his own backhoe would cost more than $100,000; on Abu Tir's salary of barely $1,000 per month, it would take forever to save that much.