The New York Times Magazine
How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets
August 18, 2013
This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary ...
Category: New York Times
A Diarist At War
The New York Times
March 14, 2013
The following story ran on the NYT’s At War blog.
With the invasion of Iraq just weeks away, Lt. Tim McLaughlin began a military ritual that dates back to Homer. He started a war diary. It was not a blog or e-mails sent from his waiting-to-invade base in the Kuwaiti ...
That’s No Phone. That’s My Tracker
The New York Times
July 15, 2012
This article was co-authored with Megha Rajagopalan.
The device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone — guess again. It is a tracking device that happens to make calls. Let’s stop calling them phones. They are trackers.
Most doubts about the principal ...
Fuel Fixers
The New York Times Magazine
How the scarcity of oil may be making our antibribery laws obsolete.
December 22, 2007
James Giffen likes to share the wealth. His generosity to friends is said to have included $180,000 for jewelry, $30,000 for fur coats, a luxury speedboat, two snowmobiles ...
Radioactive Nationalism
The New York Times Magazine
The risky maneuverings on the Korean peninsula
October 22, 2006
In a classic Mexican standoff, two men point guns at each other’s heads. Neither wants to shoot, but each knows the downside of not pulling the trigger first. It is an inherently gripping ...
The Price of Oil
The New York Times Magazine
December 18, 2005
More than 35 years ago, an offshore drilling rig spilled approximately three million gallons of oil into the waters near Santa Barbara. A massive slick covered hundreds of square miles and killed thousands of birds, seals and dolphins; the ...
The Breaking Point
The New York Times Magazine
Saudi Arabia, soaring demand and the theory of peak oil.
August 21, 2005
The largest oil terminal in the world, Ras Tanura, is located on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, along the Persian Gulf. From Ras Tanura’s control tower, you can see the classic ...
The Salvadorization of Iraq?
The New York Times Magazine
The counterinsurgency is increasingly being waged by former elite troops of Saddam Hussein’s army, with guidance from a U.S. adviser who in the 80’s commanded the Special Forces in El Salvador. It’s not a pretty campaign.
May 1, 2005
In a country ...
The Triumph of the Quiet Tycoon
The New York Times Magazine
This is a bad time to be a big-spending Russian oil billionaire. But Vagit Alekperov has figured out how to beat the system — you just play by Putin’s rules.
August 2, 2004
Pity, if you can, the richest man in Russia. With a fortune estimated at ...
The Counterinsurgent
The New York Times Magazine
Major John Nagl was a leading military scholar on how to fight a resistance. But could he make his ideas work on the ground in Iraq?
January 11, 2004
Maj. John Nagl approaches war pragmatically and philosophically, as a soldier and a scholar. He graduated ...