When I wrote for The Washington Post my boss was Michael Getler, who was in charge of the paper’s foreign coverage. He was a wizard at his job, and in his current position, as the Post’s ombudsman, he is, once more, a provocative master. In his column ...
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.
Pardon My Language
I write for American publications that do not, in general, permit profanity. This is painful because I tend to write about people for whom profanity is oxygen, and their curses convey a sense of who they are. Alas, rules are rules. A particularly genteel publication once air-brushed a line in which ...
Correction of the Day
“WASHINGTON (AP) — In a Jan. 3 story about government approval of Prozac for children, The Associated Press, using incorrect information from the Food and Drug Administration, erroneously reported that up to 25 percent ...
Honesty About Oil
People who suggest that oil is the prime reason America might invade Iraq have tended to oppose the war for that very reason—fighting over oil would seem to be an unacceptably mercenary endeavor. Tom Friedman squares the circle ...
Remember Sarajevo: A Photographic Reminder of Evil
The Digital Journalist
January 2003
Do we need to remember Sarajevo? The war in Bosnia ended in 1995, and much has happened since then, not only in Bosnia, but in the rest of the world. We have lived through the events of 9/11, we have engaged in war in Afghanistan, and we are on the verge of another ...
Plowshares Into Swords
This may tell us more about the consequences of 9/11 than anything else. Metal from the World Trade Center is being used to build a new warship.
Dazed and Confused in Baghdad
Tolstoy began “Anna Karenina” with his now-famous line, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” His view might hold true in the political world, too—successful regimes are all alike, while every failing regime fails in its own way. ...
When an American Car Hits a Double Standard in Kenya
An American diplomat in Nairobi attends a party at his ambassador’s residence and, possibly after a drink or two, gets into a head-on collision with a car driven by a teacher. The diplomat calls the American Embassy for help, a security detail arrives and whisks him away to a hospital, while ...
Nestle to (Famine-Hit) Ethiopia: Give Us More Money!
Fact #1: Ethiopia faces a famine that could be worse than the one that took a million lives in 1984.
Fact #2: Many years ago Ethiopia’s government nationalized a minor company partly owned by Nestle.
Fact #3: Ethiopia is offering $1.5 million to Nestle, which earned $3.9 billion in net profits ...
Disappearing in America
This is not a good time to be considered an “enemy combatant.” If you want to know why, click here to read my latest story in The New York Times Magazine.