When India and Pakistan held nuclear tests in 1998, they restarted the clock on a competition that had begun half a century earlier. Nuclear weapons restored strategic parity, erasing the advantage of India's much larger size and conventional military superiority. Yet in the years that followed Pakistan went on to lose decisively to India. It lost any ability to stake a serious claim to Kashmir, a region it called its jugular vein. Its ability to influence events in Afghanistan diminished....

Between South and Central Asia, in the high mountains and cold deserts, India, Pakistan and China have fought brutal wars over barren, uninhabited territory in a bid for control over their national peripheries, including Xinjiang and Tibet in China, and Jammu and Kashmir on the Indian subcontinent. White as the Shroud explores this broader story through the most surreal of such conflicts: the Siachen war, fought between India and Pakistan for control of the eponymous glacier. The tale of S...

Coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga followed in a long trail of media exposures of the more personal details of the lives of public figures. Many commentators have seen stories like this, and TV shows like Jerry Springer's, as evidence of a decline in the standards of the mass media. This increasing interest in private lives and the falling off of coverage of serious news is often described as “tabloidization.” The essays in this book are the first serious scholarly studies of what is go...