Monday Morning Reading

Two things to start your week:

1. Nick Blanford and Bilal Saab have a great article in Foreign Policy about the next war between Israel and Lebanon. I have read the paper from which this article was adapted and will be moderating a public discussion of the paper in early September at the Brookings Institution. For now, read the shorter article.

2. Nick Schmidle, the son and brother of steely-eyed Marines, has a must-read article in the New Yorker on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. This is excellent long-form journalism. I only ding Nick twice: First, for using the cliche "an eerie calm" in the first page of the article. (Are we sure it wasn't a "preternatural calm"? Or maybe it was just quiet and there was nothing "eerie" about it?) Second, Nick is a first-class analyst of Pakistani politics, and I would have loved to have seen more of his analytical reporting than what I read at the end. Overall, though, brilliant stuff.