On April 14, 2004, CIA Director George Tenet looked so impotent he might have starred in a Viagra commercial. Tenet had come before the 9/11 Commission for what was sure to be a public flogging. In response, he alternately apologized for the agency’s failure to stop 9/11 and explained it away. Finally, the exhausted panelists posed him a bottom-line question: how long would it take Tenet to get the CIA in a position to counterattack al-Qaida?

“It’s going to take another five years,” Tenet confessed, ”to build the clandestine service the way the human intelligence capability of this country need...

Solutions to modern problems sometimes can be found in a distinctly classical place. The Magnolia Special was built to recapture the grace and romance of 1930s European roadsters — internal combustion and all — yet it emits 40 percent less CO2 than an equally powerful gas-burning automobile. And it does this using technology as old as internal combustion itself.

The Magnolia Special is the first bespoke, hand-built car built specifically to run on compressed natural gas. If nothing else, it proves eco-friendly need not mean boring.

“I really don’t think that environmentalists are worth a damn as...