Blog – Page 2

Was Petraeus Borked?

Will the scandal surrounding David Petraeus, General John Allen, Paula Broadwell, Jill Kelley, and a shirtless F.B.I. agent turn into the same sort of eureka moment on privacy that Congress experienced when Judge Robert Bork’s video rentals were revealed during a bruising battle over his Supreme ... (Read more)

Cellphone? How Quaint. It’s a Tracker.

The device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone — guess again. It is a tracking device that happens to make calls. We can love or hate these devices — or love and hate them — but let’s start calling them what they are so we can fully understand what they do. Read my ... (Read more)

‘The Toppling’ Wins Mirror Award

Nice news–my New Yorker story about the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad has won the John M. Higgins Award for Best In-Depth/Enterprise Reporting, given out as one of the Mirror Awards ... (Read more)

An Enduring Condition

My latest story, just published in the Nation, is an essay about Mary Dudziak’s new book, “War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences.” The essay notes that although war ... (Read more)

Guggenheim Fellowship

Thank you, Guggenheim Foundation!

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Don’t worry, my website hasn’t been hacked. The headline for this post is the Russian title of Crude World. The Russian roughly translates as “Cruel World: The Severe Decline of the Oil Era,” which is a bit different from the original wording in English. If you’d ... (Read more)

The Truth About Angelina Jolie and Me

Okay, the headline is a bit of an exaggeration, but not entirely. Angelina Jolie has just come out with a new movie about the Bosnian war that she wrote and directed, In the Land of Blood and Honey. She’s being sued by an obscure writer who accuses ... (Read more)

What Happened at Macondo?

Remember the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Last year it captivated America’s attention as nearly five million barrels of oil gushed into the water, but once the runaway well was capped, the outrage faded away. As I write in a story in ... (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 Vladimir Putin, the prime minister ... (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, even if the minority does ... (Read more)