Was Deep Throat unmasked as early as 1973? The mystery of the identity of famous Watergate source Deep Throat was finally solved in July 2005, when Vanity Fair published a piece in which former FBI official Mark Felt said, “I’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat.” Over the years, a Deep Throat cult had evolved as Watergate junkies pored over public comments by the three men and especially over Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate stories and their best-selling 1974 memoir, All the President’s Men. The Post didn’t respond because the Post didn’t play guessing games about Deep Throat’s identity. Or did it? — Slate

A man, a plan, Afghanistan. In late May, some 40 Pakistani journalists received a summons to an unusual press conference given by Baitullah Mehsud, the rarely photographed leader of the Pakistani Taliban, who is accused of orchestrating the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, of sending suicide bombers to Spain earlier this year, and of dispatching an army of fighters into Afghanistan to attack U. S. and NATO forces in recent months. Surrounded by a posse of heavily armed Taliban guards, Mehsud boasted that he had hundreds of trained suicide bombers ready for martyrdom. — The New Republic

The Lonesome Trail: Cindy McCain’s nontraditional campaign. Cindy McCain’s account of adopting her daughter from a Bandgladeshi orphanage has become the core of the Cindy stump speech. “What you don’t know about this story is I didn’t tell my husband. I landed in Phoenix, Arizona, with this baby in my arms, and in front of a thousand reporters and a whole lot of people he whispered down to me and said, ‘Well, where’s she going to go?’ And I said, ‘I thought she’d come to our house.’ And he looked at her and he loved her just the way I have ever since. And I think that says a great deal about the man.” The story certainly helps to portray John McCain as openhearted and charitable. But it also happens to reflect the nearly separate lives lived by the two McCains, and the peculiar defiance that is characteristic of Cindy—a woman who claims to pride herself on being traditional. — The New Yorker

Health Care’s New Entrepreneurs. Today, we shop for cut-rate hotels on Travelocity, bargain for airfares on Priceline, and seek reliable information on everything from computers to flat-screen TVs at CNET. The same information explosion is occurring in health care. Internet-savvy patients can walk into their doctors’ offices knowing more about the latest treatments than their physicians do. Critics counter that health care is more complicated than hotels. Without someone to help manage complex information, they point out, patients may find themselves overwhelmed by options, fall prey to snake-oil salesmen, or fail to see that they have received incorrect diagnoses or poor treatment plans. But where critics see a problem, entrepreneurs see an opportunity. Companies are finding ways to make even the most complicated medical decisions simpler for patients. — City Journal [via 3 Quarks Daily]