Sportswriters exist in a kind of creative tension. Pulling us in one direction is the desire to draw deeper meaning from the events we cover. Pulling us in the other is the realization that sportswriting isn’t social commentary. So we tend to see the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s gold medal as a triumph of democracy over communism, or the Iraqi national soccer team’s advancing to the semifinals of the 2004 Olympic Games as a metaphor for the resilience of an oppressed, war-ravaged people. Mean

Twice in the past two years, I met two Apache helicopter crews at the Gyeonggi Provincial Office during Ulchi Focus Lens exercises. On the ground, the crew members explained the anti-armor aircraft to visitors. The crew even lifted a great number of children into the cockpits ― tirelessly, again and again, for four days. I found this to be touching. In thick combat uniforms and boots, they sweated like pigs, but their work served as a good opportunity to make the U.S. armed forces more familiar

“Boston bombings shatter a national sense of safety,” read one headline this morning. “A perfect Marathon day, then the unimaginable,” read another. These summations were plausible enough, because yesterday’s attack was the first successful strike against a U.S. city since Sept. 11, 2001. A national security official from the George W. Bush administration expressed the same thought in even more dramatic terms. “In some ways,” Juan Carlos Zarate said, “this ruptures the psyche.” Plausible ― but n

President Barack Obama’s second term has so far been a story of high liberal hopes and scant liberal achievements. The president has been re-elected, demographic trends favor the growth of his coalition, his party has a technological edge, and his opposition is confused and divided. One might therefore expect Obama to be enacting the legislative agenda of that rising coalition. Yet the White House has to be disappointed, whatever it says, by the way the second term has been going. The president’

As if to provide a warning to commentators, prognosticators, ax-grinders, think-tankers and television analysts about the dangers of petty speculation, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof posted this thought on Twitter a few minutes after today’s apparent bomb attack in Boston: “explosion is a reminder that ATF needs a director. Shame on Senate Republicans for blocking apptment.” Part of talking for a living is knowing when to shut up. It is obviously true that the Bureau of Alcohol, T

The bird-flu virus that suddenly started killing people last month in China is unquestionably a “serious human health risk,” as the scientists who discovered it have reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. H7N9 contains gene sequences that make it relatively effective, for a bird virus, at infecting humans and other mammals. People don’t appear to have natural immunity, there’s no vaccine, and so far about one in five known to have caught the virus have died. Fears grew as 11 more infec

Hardly had the excitement over President Obama’s visit subsided when Secretary of State John Kerry followed up with what seems here as a surge of fresh energy. If the president talked in general terms about the need to move forward toward a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Kerry, already on his second visit to the Middle East and Israel, seems anxious to turn words into actions.Like many secretaries of state before him, Kerry brings to the region the all too familiar Ameri

With Iran nuclear talks fizzling and North Korea threatening to turn Seoul into a sea of fire, it took political courage for U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to go before Congress this week with a 2014 defense budget that cut money for missile defense programs. Yet, in our eyes, the real problem is that the $500 million in trims was merely cosmetic. A deeper slice into the $10 billion the Pentagon spends each year on such programs wouldn’t make the U.S. one iota less safe, and would help with

It was raining heavily last week when I visited Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which commemorates Japanese who died in the “imperial cause.” But the tour buses still discharged scores of elderly Japanese visitors, and I received approving looks and even a faint smile from two Japanese women as we stood in the rain before the memorial to an Indian jurist called Radha Binod Pal. Pal was the only Indian judge at the so-called Tokyo Trials, Japan’s protracted version of Nuremberg. In his 1,2

As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama was unsparing in his criticism of President George W. Bush’s anti-terrorism policies. He condemned torture and the infamous detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the lack of transparency and congressional oversight, the dubious legal framework and the blowback that was spawning more terrorists and diminishing U.S. standing in the world. Bush’s policies “compromised our most precious values,” Obama said then. “We cannot win a war unless we maintain the high grou