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.

What Happens When an Industry Regulates Itself?

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 ... (Read more)

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 ... (Read more)

Stanford University

Palo Alto, CA
Lunchtime talk at Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism. McClatchy Hall, Chafee Seminar Room 452. From 12:15 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

‘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 ... (Read more)

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 ... (Read more)

Five Best Books on Oil

The Wall Street Journal
August 21, 2010
(The Wall Street Journal publishes a column every week in which an author lists the five best books on a particular subject. This is my list on oil.)

1. The History of the Standard Oil Company
By Ida M. Tarbell
McClure, Phillips, 1904
John D. Rockefeller’s ... (Read more)

Sanctifying by Attacking

New York Magazine
How a mosque proposed for a grubby downtown street became more of a symbol than its opponents ever intended.
August 14, 2010
How does an icon get made? Back in the fifth century, the process was quite simple: A monk or artisan would depict Jesus or Mary or one of the saints. ... (Read more)