In July 2004 an anonymous blogger revealed his identity when he allowed his photograph to be taken at the Democratic National Convention. “Atrios,” the writer of a prominent left-wing blog, Eschaton, turned out to be Duncan Black, an assistant professor of economics at Bryn Mawr College. Black had worried that a trenchant political blog might ...

During the war on terror, the United States quietly turned the world financial system into a hidden empire. The American government used the power of the dollar and its influence over obscure organizations such as the Swift financial messaging service to monitor what its adversaries and terrorists were doing and, in some cases, to cut ...