As I've reported here, the state of Florida executed Manuel Valle, 61, two nights ago, using a new formula in its chemical cocktail for a lethal injection. He had been imprisoned for thirty-three years after being convicted of killing a cop in 1978. The U.S. Supreme Court, as...

It was hardly a surprise that my favorite songwriter/actor/novelist Steve Earle got involved in activism surrounding the execution of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia last week. He was among the many celebrities who signed the petition calling on the state to grant Davis clemency. Earle told an interviewer,...

As I noted last week, the next execution in the USA is set for today, at 4 p.m., with a state-ordered killing in Raiford, Florida, of Manuel Valle, age 61. Valle was convicted of killing one highway patrol officer and wounding another -- 33 years ago. So he has spent...

With polls showing that roughly six in ten Americans still support capital punishment in the United States (even with that number declining somewhat) it's hard to make the case that the practice will be abolished any time soon. But I've argued otherwise, pointing to support dropping to under...

In the waning hours of protests against the execution on Troy Davis by the state of Georgia last Wednesday, one action drew particular notice: A group of six former wardens and correctional officials pleading for clemency and suggesting that prison staffers be allowed to refuse to take part in the...

When I attended an early screening of Rod Lurie's remake of Sam Peckinpah's controversial thriller from 1971, Straw Dogs, last week, I was most curious to see how the director handled the infamous rape scene.

Yes, the original's ultra-violence (to borrow a phrase from another controversial film of that year)...

In marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11 this past weekend, numerous reports in the media covered the enormous costs of the "war on terror," human and financial, that followed the attacks on America. No one, as far as I could see, mentioned one often hidden area that I have focused...

Bill Keller, the top editor at the New York Times since July 2003, has penned a lengthy piece for this Sunday's Times Magazine, which was launched online early this week, as if the world could not wait another day for it. This coincides with the end of Keller's...

It may surprise many to learn that, like many famous novelists, Ayn Rand had a period when she "went Hollywood." In 1943, Rand sold the rights for The Fountainhead to Warner Bros., and wrote the screenplay. She was then hired by top producer Hall Wallis as a writer, idea generator...

Nagasaki, which lost over 70,000 civilians (and just a few military personnel) to a new weapon just over sixty-six years ago, has always been the Forgotten A-Bomb City. No one ever wrote a bestselling book called Nagasaki, or made a film titled Nagasaki, Mon Amour. Yet in some ways, Nagasaki...

After more than a week in Hiroshima, it was time for the ultimate evening escape for a baseball fan: a Hiroshima Toyo Carp game. At my request, the foundation sponsoring my month-long research trip to Hiroshima and Nagasaki had secured seats for the visiting journalists right behind home plate, about...

The worst nuclear disaster to strike Japan since a single bomb fell over Nagasaki in 1945 occurred in the spring of 2011 at the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the epic tsunami. Today The New York Times reports (in a sadly submerged fashion, given the news from Libya)...

In the northwestern corner of the Hiroshima Peace Park, amid a quiet grove of trees, the earth suddenly swells. It is not much of a mound -- only about ten feet high and sixty feet across. Unlike most mounds, however, this one is hollow, and within it rests perhaps the...

Television and cinema have slighted the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but fiction has virtually ignored them -- at least explicitly. There are reasons for this, of course, including moral ambivalence. "Evil has no place, it seems, in our national mythology," asserts Tim O'Brien, author of the...

When I was a kid, my best friend Paul, in his animated way, told me (more than once) the story of a Japanese man who supposedly arrived in Nagasaki one day and while walking along a road told a friend about the unearthly bright flash he had seen in the...

Yoshito Matsushige, a photographer for the Chugoku Shimbun, took the only pictures on August 6, 1945, that have surfaced since. It was these five photos LIFE magazine published on September 29, 1952, hailing them as the "First Pictures - Atom Blasts Through Eyes of Victims," breaking the long media blackout...

Sensitive to world opinion about the use of atomic weapons against Japan in 1945, no American president has ever visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki while in office. Except for Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former general, none of them has expressed any misgivings about the use of the bombs in 1945. Shortly...

Few journalists bother to visit Nagasaki, even though it is one of only two cities in the world to "meet the atomic bomb," as some of the survivors of that experience, 66 years ago today, put it. It remains the Second City, and "Fat Man" the forgotten bomb. No one...

The worst nuclear disaster to strike Japan since a single bomb fell over Nagasaki in 1945 occurred in the spring of 2011 at the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the epic tsunami. Just last week, it was reported that radiation readings at the site had reached their highest points to...

Sixty-six years after the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bomb is still very much with us, and controversy continues to swirl over the decision to obliterate the two Japanese cities -- and, this year, how this helped make inevitable the coming of nuclear power plants, like at Fukushima,...