A City Under Siege

Near the end of Boston’s picturesque Freedom Trail lies a towering monument to the battle of Bunker Hill, visited by thousands of tourists each year. How many of them, when contemplating the 1775 battle, picture Boston under siege, a “vision of Moses: a bush burning but not consumed”? Writing in 1776, Reverend Samuel Cooper used these last words to describe the city around the time of the early Revolutionary conflicts. They also appear in an epigraph to Nathaniel Philbrick’s new book, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution, an account of the prerevolutionary tension in and around ...

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‘Bringing Mulligan Home,’ But Opening Fresh Wounds

Like many soldiers who fought in the Pacific Ocean Theater in World War II, Dale Maharidge’s father Steve Maharidge, who was a US Marine, collected artifacts of his time in battle. In a trunk in the attic, he kept a flag with the names of the men who served in his company, a Japanese passport, a business card of a Chinese brothel, and a picture of a chubby Japanese baby, among other items.

Another souvenir, a photograph of Steve and a tall friend with a goofy smile, posing in a half embrace in a camp on Guadalcanal, was a ...

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Curiosity Isn't a Crime

“Damn kids!” was the subtext of several AT&T security memos in the 60s and 70s about college students caught breaking into the company’s phone network. It’s a common reaction among victims of hacker pranks. One could easily imagine, in a much more recent instance, former President George W. Bush feeling the same way about a hacker codenamed Guccifer entering Bush’s email account and revealing his self-portraits to the world.

But those exact words were spoken by Phil Lapsley, the author of Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell ...

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It’s a Weird, Weird Life

Think of the most expansive question a popular science book could address. It might be: What are the parameters of life? If you envision life as a contained space, the center would be filled with organisms like humans, giraffes, carnivorous plants, and toenail fungus—very different in nature, yet all descendants of one common ancestor. At the outer edges of it would lie the extremophiles discovered by scientists in the ‘80s and ‘90s: bacteria that thrive in super hot hydrothermal vents, or subsist purely on caffeine (as microbiologists have recently uncovered). Everything outside of the space is what David Toomey ...

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