Welcome to my website. A few words of introduction.

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.

I am now working on my third book, which will be published by Hachette’s Grand Central imprint. The book is about my family’s complicated role in the creation of Israel, and focuses on Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg, my great-great grandfather and great grandfather. I will be a fellow at the Leon Levy Center of Biography at CUNY as I write it in 2025 and 2026.

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.