You get the financial collapse of 2008 and, as an excellent Wall Street Journal story shows, you get the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Both disasters stemmed from the ...
Category: Blog
The Strange Beauty of Spomenik
If you appreciate odd architecture from another era and another place, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are filled with war monuments that always leave an impression. Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers visited the striking Tito-era war monuments that dot the former Yugoslavia and has published ...
‘The Conversation Starts Here’
George Monbiot on the environmental movement’s failure to reduce climate-warming emissions via national or international agreements:
To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a fantasy of benign paternalistic power – acting, though the political mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider interests ...
The Best Books on Oil
The Wall Street Journal runs a weekly column in which an author lists the five best books on a particular subject. The Journal invited me to write the column this week. My five best books on oil are (drum roll…) Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company, Anthony Sampson’s ...
Iconoclasm and the “Ground Zero Mosque”
My latest story, in New York magazine, focuses on the controversy over the so-called ground zero mosque. The piece draws on lessons of iconoclasm in the modern ...
Fresh Air Does Crude World
NPR’s always-excellent literary program, Fresh Air, features an interview with me today. Click here for audio and transcript.
The Ministry of Oil Defense
That’s the nifty headline Foreign Policy uses for my latest story about the connection between oil, war and American military spending. A key question the story asks is ...
A Big Win For Transparency
A last-second and little-noted victory for transparency–the financial regulation bill approved by Congress includes an amendment ...
What’s In A Cover?
Vintage, which is publishing the paperback of Crude World on August 10, has done a wonderful job on the cover design, methinks.
The New Publishers
Stepping into the void left by mainstream media reducing their foreign coverage, the VII Photo agency has teamed up with Medecins sans Frontiers to produce a multi-part multi-media series on world hunger. Showcases the work of Antonin Kratochvil, who’s always amazing, and Ron Haviv, among others. ...