Blog

Жестокий мир: Суровый закат нефтяной эры

2012-01-04T19:02:42Z

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 like to purchase a copy, it’s published by United Press and goes for 396 rubles; click here for the link.

The Truth About Angelina Jolie and Me

2011-12-07T19:51:08Z

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 her of stealing the plot of his book about Bosnia. In an interview published yesterday by the Los Angeles Times, Jolie said she had never seen the aggrieved writer’s book and had relied on other books for inspiration, including (yes, yes) Love Thy Neighbor. I had no idea about this until a reporter for TMZ called today to ask whether I had any problems with Jolie’s use of my book. Of course I’m delighted. It gives me an excuse to post a picture of her on my otherwise non-glamorous blog.

What Happened at Macondo?

2011-09-15T19:18:37Z

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 The New York Review of Books, drilling has resumed in the area, tourists are back on the beaches, and even Tony Hayward, forced to step down as BP’s CEO, is back in the action, running a multi-billion dollar investment fund. But a spate of reports and books provide a trove of data that reveals how the oil and gas industry remains as unaccountable as the too-big-to-fail banks that brought on the financial crisis of 2008. The BP disaster revealed the same problems—lax government regulation, corporate profits despite the risks, a fawning press—that characterized the financial meltdown. Big banks and big oil have more in common than their size.

Exxon’s Russian Roulette

2011-09-09T18:47:12Z

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 of Russia, and Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon, is that you announce a deal that allows Exxon to explore for oil in Russia’s Arctic waters. According to Putin, who last week said, “It’s scary to utter such huge figures,” the deal could reach $500 billion. According to Exxon’s news release, all that’s been agreed so far is an investment of $3.2 billion. The only certainty is that the energy industry’s numbers game sometimes resembles the magical calculations the financial industry relied on before the 2008 crash. For more, click here.

Celebrating the Celebrations

2011-05-05T17:52:53Z

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 not represent the multitude. I’ve just written a short online-only piece for The New Yorker about the same topic, focusing this time on the celebrations in America over the killing of Osama bin Laden. The raucous and photogenic gatherings of college students were not, I argue, representative of a more-sober reaction among the majority of Americans, yet they dominated coverage of the country’s reaction. The visuals were fantastic; the journalism, less so.

Toppling Dictators in the Youtube Age

2011-04-12T17:34:14Z

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 Middle East show, the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, along with the eternal life the Internet grants to digital imagery, is reshaping the form and impact of political iconography. Hosni Mubarak will not be the last dictator to suffer the consequences. My thoughts on the subject are in a video-studded posting at NewYorker.com. The text-only version is here.

Scenes from Benghazi

2011-02-24T20:46:15Z

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.

Tahrir 1, Firdos 0

2011-02-08T20:34:11Z

The New Photojournalism

2011-01-26T19:45:22Z

As most news organizations slash their funding of photojournalism, photographers are turning to the crowd for financing. Take a look at emphas.is and kickstarter (here’s a link to Larry Towell’s crowd-funded project) and these smart posts by Tomas van Houtryve and David Campbell. Interesting times indeed.

The Toppling, My New Story, in the New Yorker

2011-01-03T05:28:42Z

new story, which reconstructs the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square on April 9, 2003, is in The New Yorker. It’s a lengthy article that I’ve worked on for quite a while, with support from ProPublica and the Shorenstein Center on the Press. As a companion of sorts to the story, I’ve created a new section of my website that is a collection of photos, videos, documents and links related to the article; just click here to visit it. (Photo by Alexandra Boulat/VII)

8 Magazine’s Issue on Oil

2010-11-10T12:40:35Z

8 Magazine. True, the “Empire” chapter of Crude World is excerpted in the issue, but that’s honestly not why I’m touting it. The pictures, from photographers like Christopher Anderson, Ed Kashi, Rena Effendi, Christian Lutz and Kael Alford, are tremendous. The issue’s cover photo was shot by Lutz and shows the 2009 New Year’s Eve party at the Lagos Yacht Club.

Modern Pillage

2010-11-01T17:59:20Z

click here.

Wikileaks Sheds Light on Brutality of Samarra

2010-10-25T04:09:47Z

In 2005 I wrote a cover story for the NYT Magazine about abuses committed by Iraqi troops working with American forces. These sorts of abuses—Iraqi on Iraqi, as Americans watched—are a major issue in the new batch of Wikileaks documents. I talked with the Guardian in their new video on the issue.
Update: I also talked about it on NPR’s Morning Edition.

Crude Truths—the Talk, the Flyer

2010-10-18T14:08:50Z

I’m doing a talk in Austin at the University of Texas on Oct. 28, for which the organizers have created a compelling flyer.
Wall Street Journal story shows, you get the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Both disasters stemmed from the U.S. government’s willingness to hand over regulation duties to the industries that the government was supposed to be regulating.