The very first Sunday after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney descended like a cloud on "Meet the Press" to outline the Bush administration's response. "We'll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies -- if we are going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. And, uh, so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objectives."

Around the nation, one presumes, numbed heads were nodding in approval. Whatever it takes to get those bastards. The true nature of our Faustian bargain would not become clear until later, and maybe it needed a journalist as steely and tenacious as Jane Mayer to give us the full picture. "The Dark Side" is about how the war on terror became "a war on American ideals," and Mayer gives this story all the weight and sorrow it deserves. Many books get tagged with the word "essential"; hers actually is...

And so we must ask ourselves at last if terror is the best answer to terror. Mayer has her doubts. "Torture works in several ways," she summarizes. "It can intimidate enemies, it can elicit false confessions, and it can produce true confessions. Setting aside the moral issues, the problem is recognizing what's true." Mohammed "confessed" to planning the assassinations of Presidents Clinton and Carter, as well as Pope John Paul II. Zubayda, under assault, spun outlandish tales of "plots to blow up American banks, supermarkets, malls, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, and nuclear power plants," sending law-enforcement officials scurrying down any number of blind alleys.

The greatest damage came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Chief of an al-Qaida training camp, he was captured by Pakistanis shortly after 9/11 and handed over to Egyptian interrogators, who pressed him for damaging information on Saddam Hussein. Al-Libi didn't even understand what "biological weapons" were, and at first he was so confused by the line of questioning he couldn't come up with a story. Soon enough, he figured out what his interrogators wanted, and the tale he fabricated -- WMD flowing in an unbroken line from Saddam to al-Qaida -- became a decisive factor in the decision to go to war. When asked later why he had lied, al-Libi had a simple explanation: "They were killing me. I had to tell them something."

Much as I hate to repeat one of Rush Limbaugh's flat, stale and unprofitable applause lines, that's the only conclusion I can draw after witnessing the left-wing blogosphere's bizarre reaction to the New Yorker cover depicting Barack Obama in the Oval Office as a dishdasha-clad Muslim terrorist, exchanging a "terrorist fist jab" with Michelle Obama, who is dressed like a latter-day Angela Davis with huge 'fro, combat boots, assault rifle and bandolier of bullets -- while Osama bin Laden looks approvingly on from a picture frame and an American flag burns merrily in the presidential fireplace. To judge from the reaction of much of the left, you'd think that New Yorker editor David Remnick had morphed into some kind of hideous hybrid of Roger Ailes and Roland Barthes and was waging an insidious Semiotic War against Obama.

Although every critic of the New Yorker understood the simple satire of the cover, the most fretful of them worried that the illustration would be misread by the ignorant masses who don't subscribe to the magazine. Los Angeles Times blogger Andrew Malcolm wrote, "That's the problem with satire. A lot of people won't get the joke. Or won't want to. And will use it for non-humorous purposes, which isn't the New Yorker's fault." Malcolm continues in this vein, calling it a "problem" that "there's no caption on the cover to ensure that everyone" will understand the punch line.

Here's ABC News' Jake Tapper singing the harmony line:

Intent factors into these matters, of course, but no Upper East Side liberal—no matter how superior they feel their intellect is—should assume that just because they're mocking such ridiculousness, the illustration won't feed into the same beast in emails and other media. It's a recruitment poster for the right-wing.

Calling on the press to protect the common man from the potential corruptions of satire is a strange, paternalistic assignment for any journalist to give his peers, but that appears to be what The New Yorker's detractors desire. I don't know whether to be crushed by that realization or elated by the notion that one of the most elite journals in the land has faith that Joe Sixpack can figure out a damned picture for himself...

Only weak thinkers fear strong images. The publication that convenes itself as a polite dinner party, serving only strained polenta and pureed peas, need not invite me to sup.

Fascinating new research by my University of Chicago colleague, Jeffrey Grogger, compares the wages of people who “sound black” when they talk to those who do not.

His main finding: blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.)

How does Grogger know who “sounds black?” As part of a large longitudinal study called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, follow-up validation interviews were conducted over the phone and recorded.

Grogger was able to take these phone interviews, purge them of any identifying information, and then ask people to try to identify the voices as to whether the speaker was black or white. The listeners were pretty good at distinguishing race through voices: 98 percent of the time they got the gender of the speaker right, 84 percent of white speakers were correctly identified as white, and 77 percent of black speakers were correctly identified as black.

Grogger asked multiple listeners to rate each voice and assigned the voice either to a distinctly white or black category (if the listeners all tended to agree on the race), or an indistinct category if there was disagreement.

Then he put this measure of whether a voice sounded black into a regression (the standard statistical tool that economists use for estimating things), and came up with the finding that blacks who “sound black” earn almost 10 percent less, even after taking into account other factors that could influence earnings. One piece of interesting good news is that blacks who do not “sound black” earn essentially the same as whites.