Author: Peter Maass

It’s not easy being female in Pashtun society but it’s not much easier being male. Men and women are strictly segregated–burqas predated the Taliban by centuries–which means the only females a male is supposed to see in his lifetime are his mother, sisters (if he has any) and ...  (Read more)

The Washington Post has an excellent story about the secret war waged in Afghanistan by the CIA and the Special Forces. It began on October 19, when a dozen Special Forces soldiers, known as Team 555, choppered ...  (Read more)

Should the Pentagon co-produce television shows? That’s the issue behind this New York Times story, which describes a wave of new programs as “militainment.” The Pentagon is offering detailed technical support to ...  (Read more)

Richard Holbrooke states the obvious, but the easily-forgotten obvious–shoring up Afghanistan is as important as taking down the Taliban. Holbrooke is too optimistic about the prospects for nation-building; there’s ...  (Read more)

Strange things happen in strange places, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that a young American from Brooklyn has emerged from Yasser Arafat’s besieged compound in Ramallah. Adam Shapiro, who ...  (Read more)

Monster’s Ball is a special film. Halle Berry won an Academy Award for her performance, which is why I decided, after the Oscars were handed out, to see it with a friend. Berry is great but Billy Bob Thornton is greater, and Monster’s Ball ...  (Read more)

The best feature in The New York Times, when the feature runs, is an Editors’ Note. The Times runs Corrections almost every day, but an Editors’ Note is different and less frequent, because it means the paper really messed up and has some explaining to do. The notes are wonderful ...  (Read more)

I would have thought this was a Modern Humorist hoax—The International Federation of Competitive Eating–were it not for an IFOCE-sanctioned burrito-eating contest I happened to attend a few days ago in Tribeca. As the burritos disappeared down the gullets ...  (Read more)

Thomas Friedman notes today the importance of altering the shape of repressive governments in the Muslim world. He recently wrote that poverty does contribute to terrorism and that perhaps we should do something about it. Both columns ...  (Read more)