Author: Peter Maass

I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.

What Happened at the Macondo Well?

The New York Review of Books
September 29, 2011

The anniversary of the largest oil spill in American history passed with little notice this summer. On July 15, 2010, the ruptured BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was finally sealed after gushing oil for nearly three months, ... (Read more)

Exxon’s Russian Roulette

The New York Review of Books
September 9, 2011

How can you turn $3.2 billion into $500 billion in a day?

If you are Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, and Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon, you announce a deal that allows Exxon to explore for oil in Russia’s ... (Read more)

Exxon’s Russian Roulette

How can you turn $3.2 billion into $500 billion in a day? That’s the question I ask in a post on the New York Review of Book’s blog. The answer, if you are ... (Read more)

Celebrating the Celebrations

Earlier this year I wrote a lengthy story for The New Yorker about the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003; the story was, among other things, a study of how the media tends to substitute a photogenic minority for a less-photogenic multitude, ... (Read more)

Celebrating the Celebrations

The New Yorker
May 4, 2011

Can a news photograph be too vivid? It’s an essential question as we consider the pros and cons of President Barack Obama’s ... (Read more)

Toppling Dictators in the YouTube Age

The world’s first icons, predating the era of mass reproduction, originated in times when it was at least theoretically possible to smash every painting of a religious figure or tear down every statue of a potentate. That’s no longer possible. As the uprisings in the ... (Read more)

Toppling Dictators in the YouTube Age

Toppling Dictators in the YouTube Age

The New Yorker Online
April 12, 2011
(An online-only article at NewYorker.com)

In February, two days into the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi, a crowd of protesters in Tobruk, in eastern Libya, created a political icon. At a square in the city, they toppled a larger-than-life ... (Read more)

Scenes from Benghazi

CNN’s Ben Wedemen is doing an amazing job in Libya (as he has done in other countries in the Mideast). This piece from Benghazi is just about as memorable as a liberation clip can be. If the link on the video doesn’t work, click here for the video on CNN’s site.