Fight Club

In a scene near the end of Page One, Andrew Rossi’s 2011 documentary about the New York Times, Brian Stelter, a reporter on the Times media desk, learns that NBC is preparing to declare the end of the Iraq war. The network’s correspondent Richard Engel is embedded with what NBC describes as the “last combat troops” in Iraq, the US Army’s 4/2 Stryker Brigade. Engel’s live broadcast from the back of a troop transport vehicle rattling across the Kuwaiti border, anchor Brian Williams informs his audience on that evening’s NBC Nightly News, “constitutes the official Pentagon announcement” of

culture Summer 2011

Waiting for the Big One

Early in the evening of March 27, 1964, a 9.2-magnitude earthquake shook Anchorage, Alaska, to pieces, and loosed a tsunami down the Pacific coast that claimed lives and coastal infrastructure as far south as Crescent City, California. The Good Friday Earthquake, as it was later called, was the largest recorded seismic event in American history, and a young US Geological Survey geologist named George Plafker flew to Anchorage the following day to find the fault line that had caused all the trouble. To his surprise, he couldn’t: There was no jagged vertical fracture in the earth as there would