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The State of the NYPD

January 18, 2012  •  City Journal

Less is more. That was the message that New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly gave the Police Foundation Tuesday morning as he offered an upbeat report on the department's accomplishments and innovations over the past year.

In a speech billed as his annual "state of the NYPD" assessment, Kelly touted crime statistics showing not only that the city was the safest it has been since 1963, but also that his department was operating at its leanest. Despite having 6,000 fewer cops on the street than six years ago, the NYPD has continued, Kelly said, working to reduce crime, combat terrorism, and improve community relations—the NYPD's three top priorities.

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How many have to die?

January 12, 2012  •  The Daily

How many people must die in a civil conflict before President Obama decides that American intervention is warranted?

Syria is our most urgent test case.

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review of War Horse

January 11, 2012  •  Tablet Magazine

How many horses does it take to make a War Horse? Film icon Steven Spielberg reportedly used 14 different horses to portray Joey, the main character of the film version of Michael Morpurgo's 1982 children's novel about the bond between a horse and the boy who owns him, the price of courage, and the horrors of war. By contrast, there are no horses in the stage version of the same saga, which, fortunately, is still playing at New York's Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. But the theatrical Joey, a heart-throb of a puppet manipulated by three first-class actors inside an equine frame, is far more memorable than all the stallions of Arabia, or the 280 horses that Steven Spielberg was said to have used in a single scene of his schmaltzy, sweeping epic—a Gone With the Wind for children and perhaps horses.

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Hearts and Minds

December 14, 2011  •  Tablet Magazine

Two plays—Blood and Gifts, a drama about the origins of America's war in Afghanistan, now at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater, and Captors, which examines the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann and which ran at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston through last weekend—demonstrate the power and hazards of bringing recent history to the stage.

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Reading the mullahs' minds

December 6, 2011  •  The Daily

Could Iran's mullahs be losing their grip? It's a question worth exploring, given Tehran's increasingly aggressive, erratic behavior.

Some veteran Iran analysts have long predicted the regime's collapse, or possibly its transformation into a more pragmatic, if not exactly "moderate" state. But while I've usually considered such predictions wishful thinking, Tehran's increasingly strident rhetoric and belligerent conduct, coupled with signs of economic strain and growing internal political strife, make me wonder whether the 32-year-old Islamic Republic may not be approaching a breaking point.

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Books by Judith Miller