Every weekend, Longform highlights its favorite international articles of the week. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform's new app and read all of the latest in-depth stories from dozens of magazines, including Foreign Policy.
The Force
Jill Lepore • New Yorker
How the United States came to spend more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined.
The United States spends more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined. Between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled, reaching more than seven hundred billion dollars a year-more, in adjusted dollars, than at any time since the Allies were fighting the Axis. The 2011 Budget Control Act, which raised the debt ceiling and created both the fiscal cliff and a Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, which was supposed to find a way to steer clear of it, required four hundred and eighty-seven billion dollars in cuts to military spending, spread over the next ten years. The cliff-fall mandates an additional defense-budget reduction of fifty-five billion dollars annually. None of these cuts have gone into effect. McKeon has been maneuvering to hold the line.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Dead Sea Scrolls Go to Court
Batya Ungar-Sargon • Tablet
A scholarly dispute devolves into criminal impersonation.
In the emails, the fictional Schiffman admitted to having plagiarized the work of Norman Golb, professor at the University of Chicago's prestigious Oriental Institute, Dead Sea Scrolls scholar-and also Raphael's father. "It is true that I should have cited Dr. Golb's articles when using his arguments," the email reads, "and it is true that I misrepresented his ideas. But this is simply the politics of Dead Sea Scrolls studies. If I had given credit to this man I would have been banned from conferences around the world." It was signed-by some accounts, implausibly-"Lawrence Schiffman, professor," with a lower-case "p."
Raphael Golb admits to having sent the email, but he maintains that it was an act of parody, rather than criminal impersonation. "I was exercising my right to expose, condemn, and ridicule the misconduct of other people," he says. "It says more about Schiffman than it does about me, that people might have believed that an informal email from a gmail account admitting to plagiarism, signed with a lower-case ‘p' in professor, could have come from an NYU department chair."
Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images
SUBJECTS:
