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.

A City On The Move

Things you see on the streets of Karachi: a motorcycle with five people on board (a father driving, a child in his lap, a child behind him, wife behind the child, riding side-saddle, holding a baby); donkey pulling a cart laden with 30-foot steel girders; motorized rickshaw with six or seven schoolkids ...  (Read more)

The Catwalks Of Karachi

Last night I attended a fashion show, and a few nights earlier I attended a fashion show. That’s two more fashion shows than I’ve attended in America, or anywhere. The shows took place by an outdoor pool at a luxury hotel in the center of Karachi, and they seemed the real thing (Fashion ...  (Read more)

Knock Knock

You are caught in a traffic jam in Karachi and a beggar raps on your window. He displays a withered limb or (take your pick) a twitching stump, a bleeding abscess, an arm bent like a question mark, hands with no fingers, a goutish tumor, a cleft lip, a scorched face. The look in his yellowed eyes ...  (Read more)

A Digital Leap Forward

Most technological breakthroughs are not breakthroughs in all ways; there’s often a drawback of one sort or another. As has been noted widely, PDAs are great but they don’t have the permanence of datebooks. A few years ago I leafed through my grandfather’s datebook from the 1950s; ...  (Read more)

The Slim-Fast Indicator

I walked into a drugstore in Islamabad yesterday and noticed, in a proud stack by the cash register, a dozen cans of Slim-Fast. A few yards away, on the street, was a montage of Pakistani misery—street kids, homeless men, hunger. This might be an economic indicator in the era of globalization, though ...  (Read more)