Turning 50: The tragedy of Tonkin Gulf

Remembering the policy and devastation of The Gulf of Tonkin incident on August 2, 1964.

They came in from the west: three North Vietnamese patrol boats, halting five miles from the USS Maddox. The Maddox fired first. One Vietnamese boat launched a torpedo. Then the boats raced away, strafed by U.S. jets. One boat sank.

So, at least on the first day there was a battle. A few nights later President Lyndon Johnson was on TV, describing two attacks, reassuring Americans we “seek no wider war,” and asking Congress for the power to take “all necessary measures” against “open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.” A year later, we had almost 200,000 troops in Vietnam. Read more

Originally published in TheHill.com, August 1, 2014.

COVER STORY: The new age of algorithms: How it affects the way we live

‘Big Data’ impacts how we work, elect our presidents, and play tennis. It also affects the way we’re watched.

WASHINGTON — They work a few hundred yards from one of the Library of Congress‘s most prized possessions: a vellum copy of the Bible printed in 1455 by Johann Gutenberg, inventor of movable type. But almost six centuries later, Jane Mandelbaum and Thomas Youkel have a task that would confound Gutenberg.

The researchers are leading a team that is archiving almost every tweet sent out since Twitter began in 2006. A half-billion tweets stream into library computers each day.

Their question: How can they store the tweets so they become a meaningful tool for researchers – a sort of digital transcript providing insights into the daily flow of history? Read more

Originally published in The Christian Science Monitor, August 11, 2013.