Author: Peter Maass

I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.

Seeing Revolution: The Altered Image of War in New and Old Media

Rutgers, NJ
A talk at Rutgers on the evolving nature of conflict journalism, as both war and media are transformed by emerging technologies.
October 3, 2011
7-9 PM
Rutgers Student Center Multi-Purpose Room
126 College Ave.
New Brunswick, NJ 08901

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)

What Happened at the Macondo Well?

The New York Review of Books
September 29, 2011
The anniversary of the largest oil spill in American history passed with little notice this summer. On July 15, 2010, the ruptured BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was finally sealed after gushing oil for nearly three months, but there ... (Read more)

Exxon’s Russian Roulette

The New York Review of Books
September 9, 2011
(The following was published on the New York Review’s blog.)

How can you turn $3.2 billion into $500 billion in a day?

If you are Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, and Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon, you announce a deal that ... (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 ... (Read more)

Celebrating the Celebrations

The New Yorker Online
May 4, 2011
(An online-only article at NewYorker.com)

Can a news photograph be too vivid? It’s an essential question as we consider the pros and cons of President Barack Obama’s decision not to release photos of Osama bin Laden’s corpse. So far, though, the American media ... (Read more)

Toppling Dictators in the Youtube Age

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 ... (Read more)

Toppling Dictators in the Youtube Age

Toppling Dictators in the Youtube Age

The New Yorker Online
April 12, 2011
(An online-only article at NewYorker.com)

In February, two days into the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi, a crowd of protesters in Tobruk, in eastern Libya, created a political icon. At a square in the city, they toppled a larger-than-life version of Qaddafi’s ... (Read more)