In February, 2008, journalist Jere Van Dyk, who had spent a lot of years in Afghanistan, was kidnapped by the Taliban and held for 45 days. He was the second American journalist kidnapped in Pakistan (the first was Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by his captors six years before Van Dyk […]
Here’s my conversation with Jillian Moul, co-director of “Surviving Home,” a documentary that follows four veterans over an eight-year period as they rebuild their lives after war. Among the questions I asked her: How did you get them to open up? Are they still proud they volunteered to go to war, or wish they’d never […]
Here’s my conversation with Ken Burns, whose new PBS documentary series, “The Vietnam War,” will debut on September 17th. Among my questions: Vietnam veterans don’t like talking about the war — how did you get them to open up? Was that because of how they were treated when they came home? Do they look back […]
Here’s something you rarely read about: a war that has ended. In Colombia, the FARC rebels have surrendered their weapons and agreed to a peace plan with the government they have waged war against for more than five (!) decades. From Newsweek… FARC began as a group of farmers in the 1960s, but gradually became […]
Eric Schlosser writes about the possibility of World War III by mistake, with a long look at the status of nuclear weapons in the US and Russia, and the possibility of accidental launches due to technology that’s more outmoded than you could possibly believe… Today, the United States has four hundred and forty Minuteman III […]
On 9/01, as I watched the devastation in New York, my thoughts turned to my brother Seth, who commuted each day from New Jersey, through the World Trade Center, to his office a few blocks away. With the havoc caused in the communication system due to the loss of the antennae atop the WTC, I […]