Welcome to my website. A few words of introduction.

Crude World book cover

I am a writer and editor. My first book was Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, about the conflict in Bosnia. It was published in 1996 and won a Los Angeles Times book prize and the Overseas Press Club’s book prize. My second book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, was a finalist in 2010 for the New York Public Library’s award for excellence in journalism.

At the start of my journalism career I was a freelance foreign correspondent, writing for the Washington Post, the New York Times and other publications, based for 13 years in Brussels, Seoul, and Budapest. After that, I was a U.S.-based magazine writer, contributing mostly to the New York Times Magazine, though also to the New Yorker and others. The magazine stories I wrote were from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. From 2014 to 2024, I was a senior editor and writer at the Intercept.

You can find most of my magazine articles on this site, all of my Intercept stories, excerpts from my books, a selection of my wartime stories from Bosnia, and links to other projects.