Los Angeles Times
August 15, 2004
(Review of The Stone Fields: An Epitah for the Living. By Courtney Angela Brkic)
It used to be that a young American, seeking adventure or enlightenment, would join the Peace Corps and, after two years in a distant locale, return home with an abundance of exotic memories ...
What is life like for a man who is worth $4 billion and controls as much oil as ExxonMobil? My profile of Vagit Alekperov, the president of Lukoil, is the cover story of this week’s New York Times Magazine. The article ...
The New York Times Magazine
August 2, 2004
Pity, if you can, the richest man in Russia. With a fortune estimated at $15 billion, Mikhail Khodorkovsky is on trial for fraud, embezzlement and tax evasion and faces a 10-year jail term. His oil company, Yukos, has been hit with a tax bill of $3.4 billion, ...
If you want to understand how the abuses occurred at Abu Ghraib, the best explanation is contained in a story in today’s New York Times. The story recounts a 1971 experiment at Stanford University in which 24 ...
Gizmodo
May 3, 2004
Although we started out aiming for other topics, Gizmodo being what it is, we tended toward the technical, and ended up asking accomplished war correspondent Peter Maass something very much like “What’s in your Gadget Bag?” Which is fine, but it’s the stories ...
For anyone interested in updates on North Korea, a CNN journalist, Rebecca Mackinnon, has started a new website, NKzone, which tracks developments there and includes a useful variety of links and discussions.
In today’s Washington Post, an Army lieutenant colonel writes a lengthy opinion piece criticizing an embryonic Marine policy to use a “velvet gloves” approach in the Sunni Triangle, in contrast ...
John Nagl was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University who wrote his PhD thesis about counter-insurgency. He read every classic book on the issue, his favorite being T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” which warns that fighting a guerrilla war is “messy and slow, like eating ...
The New York Times Magazine
January 11, 2004
Maj. John Nagl approaches war pragmatically and philosophically, as a soldier and a scholar. He graduated close to the top of his West Point class in 1988 and was selected as a Rhodes scholar. He studied international relations at Oxford for two years, then ...
