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Slate.com Table of Contents dispatches Darfur election scorecard Advanced Search Glimmer of Hope art explainer Spain's Greatest Living Painter Do Text Messages Live Forever? books explainer Spring Books in Brief What's a Botnet? books explainer Best in Verse Life in an Austrian Dungeon books explainer Criminals Without Borders Six Thousand Gallons of Regular, Please bushisms fighting words Bushism of the Day One Angry Man chatterbox foreigners Peggy Noonan's Litmus Test Jimmy Carter's Magic Words Convictions foreigners Secret Law Boris vs. Ken corrections gaming Corrections It's Not Just About Killing Hookers Anymore culturebox green room Lawn Pox The Carbon Olympics culturebox hey, wait a minute iHero Is India More Equal Than the United States? culturebox hollywoodland The Sweet Smell of Success Analyze This culturebox hot document Mickey Mouse Operation So You Want To Be a Scientologist dear prudence hot document The Object of His Obsession Canada's Baby-Bottle Decree Deathwatch human nature The Hillary Deathwatch Don't TNT Me, Bro Deathwatch jurisprudence The Hillary Deathwatch Gaming Indiana Deathwatch jurisprudence The Hillary Deathwatch Getting Away With Torture Deathwatch jurisprudence The Hillary Deathwatch How Dumb Are We? did you see this? map the candidates Top Five Laziest Inventions Five Days Out Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 1/87 medical examiner recycled The Doctor Is in Your PC Beware of the Blob moneybox slate v There Will Be Blood Orange Juice Interviews 50 Cents: Serious Writer's Block moneybox slate v Stop Blaming the Insurers Did the Rev. Wright Persuade? moneybox slate v The Agony of the Food Snob Dear Prudence: Quaint Clichés Run Amok moneybox sports nut Going, Going, Not Gone Why Doesn't Anybody Go to the Horse Races? moneybox sports nut The Age of Grand Dilution Sheik Mohammed's Billion-Dollar Question movies sports nut Iron Man Zero Effect music box television Bigger Than Elvis Funny Woman other magazines the chat room The Teenybopper Factory Kill Joy poem the green lantern "Abundance" Paper Recycling—Is It Worth It? politics today's blogs Campaign Junkie Say It Ain't So, Joe politics today's blogs Obama and Orwell The Day After politics today's blogs Hillary for Mother Superior Wright Stuff politics today's blogs Slate's Delegate Calculator ID, Please politics today's papers That's Hysterical Size Matters politics today's papers Obama Tries To Get Back on His Good Foot A Higher Toll press box today's papers Let Murdoch Be Murdoch Breaking Up Is Hard To Do press box today's papers The Times Travel Section Plays Hide the Salami With Friends Like These reading list today's papers Better Read Than Red Lenders' Remorse recycled today's papers How Much Do Racehorses Pee? Hunger Artists Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 2/87 the right hand of the King of Saudi Arabia. After his death in today's papers 1967, Mohamed's dozens of children spread the family fortune Can We All Get Along? around the world, struck deals with American elites, and also gave us the world's most notorious terrorist. Coll paints vivid portraits of many of Mohamed's 29 sons but two in particular: Salem, who led the family after his father's death, a party- hopping, nocturnal daredevil who longed to marry a French Advanced Search woman, a German, a Brit, and an American—all at once; and Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET Osama, the overlooked, soft-spoken, glory-seeking troublemaker. Coll gets inside Saudi Arabia like no reporter before him, art uncovering facts about Osama's finances and family Spain's Greatest Living Painter relationships that even the CIA missed. There's a wonderful The haunting Realism of Antonio López García. interlude about the brothers investing in a satellite phone By Christopher Benfey company at the very moment Osama realizes sat phones are the Wednesday, April 30, 2008, at 6:51 AM ET perfect tool to run his global terror network. Particularly rich in detail is Coll's explanation of Osama's radicalization, from the Muslim Brotherhood teacher who promised to play soccer with Click here to read a slide-show essay about Antonio López Osama and his schoolmates but taught them the Koran instead to García. the way in which Osama's increasing fundamentalism at first helped the family by reinforcing its Islamic bona fides with conservative Saudi royals, then caused huge trouble when . Osama started blowing things up. —David Plotz . The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain. The Internet blossoms into something more powerful . and fantastic every couple of months because it's a generative technology, writes legal scholar and activist Jonathan Zittrain, open to modifications from a wide group of people. Like other generative technologies—the PC, Windows, the Firefox browser—the Internet unleashes unexpected innovations from books unanticipated corners, thereby enriching us all. Example: When Jobs and Wozniak invented the Apple II, nobody had any idea Spring Books in Brief that somebody would come along and create a killer application What Slate's reading this spring. By Reza Aslan, Stephen Burt, Amanda Fortini, Nathan Heller, like the spreadsheet. (On the downside, generativity makes Melinda Henneberger, Troy Patterson, David Plotz, Jack Shafer, spam, viruses, and spyware possible, too.) John Swansburg, Justin Taylor, and June Thomas Friday, May 2, 2008, at 7:07 AM ET Zittrain worries about a growing countertrend: Nongenerative devices, such as the iPhone and the Xbox, which are born locked down. Because a nongenerative device can be adapted or Nonfiction improved only by its creators, it dead-ends the processes of discovery and invention that have typified the last three decades The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, of computing. Zittrain fears that the freedom to create that we by Steve Coll. In the past four years, New Yorker writer Steve take for granted will vanish and be replaced by a world of Coll has published two amazing books about America's "sterile appliances tethered to a network of control." Unless we misadventures in the Islamic (and Islamist) world—first Ghost resist.—Jack Shafer Wars and now The Bin Ladens, which is one of the most enthralling family stories ever written. Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent, by Fred Burton, and A Case of Exploding Mangoes, by Mohammed Coll had the insight to recognize that the Bin Ladens embody the Hanif. Spy memoirs, like pornography, appeal to readers who most important conflicts of our age. Tribalism, nationhood, crave novelty rather than originality. Connoisseurs of both Islam, Islamism, secularism, modernity, and technology—the genres will tell you that sticking to the well-worn formula is a Saudi family struggles with all of them. He begins with virtue, and, in that sense, Ghost: Confessions of a Mohamed Bin Laden, who rose from tribal poverty in Yemen to Counterterrorism Agent is very virtuous indeed. Fred Burton Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 3/87 tells the story of his years in the Diplomatic Security Service A Pocket Full of History: Four Hundred Years of America— with a mélange of brand names (three in the book's second One State Quarter at a Time, by Jim Noles. It was nearly a sentence alone), clichéd emotions, and studiously displayed decade ago that Caesar Rodney first galloped across a Delaware stoicism. (Protecting the homeland impinges on family life, but quarter; later this year, when King Kamehameha takes his so it goes.) Still, he supplies just enough scoop on his role rightful place on Hawaii's, the U.S. Mint's State Quarters chasing terrorists to keep things interesting. program will be complete. By all accounts, it's been a great success. A Mint survey cited recently by the Times claims that One of the cases Burton describes is his investigation into the nearly half of Americans collect the coins "in casual 1988 downing of Pakistani President Gen. Zia-ul-Haq's plane. accumulations or as a serious numismatic pursuit." As a not- As far as he's concerned, the KGB did it. Mohammed Hanif's entirely-casual accumulator—I got a little worked up when I first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, explores the death of finally found the strangely elusive Indiana—I figured I'd be an Gen. Zia in a far more entertaining and original way and offers a easy mark for Jim Noles' new study of the series. very different culprit. The main protagonist, Pakistani Air Force Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri, seems too obsessed with his Noles divides the book into 50 chapters, decoding each coin's silent drill squad to be responsible for the assassination, but iconography in a short historical essay. For some states, this other suspects abound: Shigri's perfume-wearing bunkmate approach makes good sense. I've always admired the understated Obaid, resourceful laundry man Uncle Starchy, pot-smoking beauty of the Connecticut quarter, but it wasn't until Noles filled American Lt. Bannen, perhaps even a mango-loving crow. Or me in on the rollicking tale of the state's Charter Oak that I fully did a higher power intervene? Hanif's book is sexy, subversive, appreciated its pluck as well. More often, however, Noles' essays and magical, a soaring counterpoint to Burton's earth-bound do little to illuminate the coin at hand. Nebraska's quarter, which realm of facts.—June Thomas depicts Chimney Rock, inspires a detailed account of that geological formation, complete with a meditation on its Native- God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency American name—Elk Penis. From John F.