Wired
Urine shakes, sweat lettuce, fecal wheat bread sandwiches.
June 1998
The steel door swings shut on the chamber, sealing off the outside world. They feel no fear or regret, the four of them, just eagerness to get on with their new lives. After a stretch of hard work, Nigel Packham showers ...
Category: Article
It’s Risky to Talk Tough on Kosovo
The New York Times
March 10, 1998
The Clinton Administration does not hesitate to express its moral outrage when a crisis unfolds in a place like Kosovo, a province of Serbia where 90 percent of the residents are ethnic Albanians.
“We are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities ...
The Fevers of Nationalism
Los Angeles Times
The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience. By Michael Ignatieff
March 1, 1998
By Michael Ignatieff
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt
210 pp. $24.95
Unwinnable Wars: American Power and Ethnic Conflict.
By David Callahan
Hill & Wang
240 pp. $23
...
Messages From Mir
The New Yorker
How the mistakes made on the Russian space station bring us closer to Mars.
October 20, 1997
It was ten at night, the day had been a long one, and before going to sleep Vasily Tsibliyev wanted to call Tamara Globa. She was turning forty, and there was a small party at ...
Welcome to Silicorn Valley
Wired
Fairfield, Iowa is home to some of the wily callback companies that are now turning themselves into virtual phone companies to battle telco giants.
September 1997
The plane lands without incident at Chicago’s teeming O’Hare International Airport, where everyone’s on ...
Love and Fury in the Balkans
The Washington Post
Montenegro. By Starling Lawrence
August 20, 1997
By Starling Lawrence
Farrar Straus Giroux. 306 pp. $23
Reviewed by Peter Maass
There is a passage in Rebecca West’s classic book about the Balkans, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” in which she wrote of being waked in a ...
Righteous Wrath
The New York Times
July 14, 1997
The last time I saw Simo Drljaca, he gave me a friendly pat on the back as I said goodbye. We had spent the better part of a day together, ending it with a beer and a toast to peace. Mr. Drljaca was a warlord in Prijedor, and he gave me a tour of his prison ...
Know Maass
Slate
July 10, 1997
When I first moved to Manhattan, a neighbor approached me in the corridor of my apartment building.
“Are you Peter Maass, the writer?”
Though I have heard this many times over the years, I still don’t know the correct response. Yes, I am; no, I am not. Both are accurate. ...
Rwanda, the Sorrow and the Pity
The Washington Post
Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey. By Fergal Keane
August 25, 1996
By Fergal Keane
Viking. 198 pp. $21.95
Reviewed by Peter Maass
HOW DO you explain what war is like? How do you explain the mad violence of drunken soldiers or the spiritual ruins that survivors have been turned into? ...
Suddenly They Are Killers
The Washington Post
May 12, 1996
His name was Ibrahim. I was interviewing him at a refugee center in Croatia, in a cold room that smelled of stale cigarettes. It was late 1992. Ibrahim had just been released from Omarska, a Serb prison camp where he witnessed the worst of atrocities, ...