A look into the lives of female war correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, Maggie O’Kane, and Jacky Rowland:
Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were “mini– training camps” and a trove of documents about how to make chemical and nuclear weapons. The BBC’s newest sensation, a confident and exuberant 37-year-old Brit, Jacky Rowland, completed her mission of being one of the first Western correspondents into that country after September 11. “We left CNN and their equipment on the tarmac [in Tajikistan], which was a sheer delight,” says Rowland. During the first few days of the U.S. bombing, The Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane—a disheveled human tornado from Ireland who now lives in Edinburgh—endured a weeklong trek from Pakistan into Afghanistan, traversing “Horse Killer Pass.” Janine di Giovanni, an Italian-American with Jessica Rabbit looks, who writes for the London Times (and is a contributing editor at this magazine), vigorously dodged al-Qaeda fire while in Tora Bora. The only member of the group not to have recently visited Afghanistan is the toughest of them all, Marie Colvin, an American who writes for The Sunday Times of London. Instead, she was relearning to negotiate stairs after losing sight in one eye to shrapnel. She now wears a black pirate’s patch. She also has a beaded, sparkly one that was given to her by her friend Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary. “It’s my party patch,” says Colvin as she brings her shaky match to her Silk Cut cigarette. “I never thought in my life I’d be the woman with the patch. But there you are, life changes.”
Even that Tuesday, a pattern had begun to emerge. The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre and twisted four decades of rule inculcated in a society that feels disfigured. It didn’t matter that we were bound, or that Lynsey was a woman. But moments of kindness inevitably emerged, drawing on a culture’s far deeper instinct for hospitality and generosity. A soldier brought Tyler and Anthony, sitting in a pickup, dates and an orange drink. Lynsey had to talk to a soldier’s wife who, in English, called her a donkey and a dog. Then they unbound Lynsey and, sitting in another truck, gave Steve and her something to drink.
Photo: ANTHONY SHADID. The reporter, middle right, interviewed residents of Imbaba, a lower-class neighborhood of Cairo, on Feb. 2, during the days of street demonstrations leading to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. (Credit: Ed Ou for The New York Times)
On the encouraging signs of change in Burma—from the end of press censorship to the release of some political prisoners. A report from inside, and questions about why the government is doing it:
Ever since the country’s longtime dictator, Than Shwe, stepped aside early last year, a remarkable thaw has appeared to be underway in Burma—and journalists have been among the prime beneficiaries. In June 2011, the government announced that magazines focusing on sports, technology, entertainment, health, and children’s topics no longer had to be submitted for censorship. Later, publications covering business, economics, law, or crime were also exempted. In October, U Tint Swe, head of the Press Scrutiny and Registration Department, made a mind-boggling statement during a rare interview with Radio Free Asia (RFA). ‘Press censorship,’ he said, ‘is nonexistent in most other countries as well as among our neighbors, and, as it is not in harmony with democratic practices, press censorship should be abolished in the near future.’ For the head of the censorship board to say this at all was astonishing, but for him to say it to a news organization like RFA, which is funded by the U.S. government and has been banned in Burma, was unthinkable. (Until recently, state media spouted melodramatic slogans about RFA and other external radio services running Burmese-language programs, calling them ‘killers in the airwaves’ and accusing them of producing a ‘skyful of lies.’)
Matt Pearce is a contributing writer for The Los Angeles Times, The New Inquiry, and The Pitch. He’s based in Kansas City and recently covered the Egyptian elections and uprisings on Tahrir Square.
I think this year we’ve reached this saturation point where a critical mass people have finally accepted the deep role social media plays in the way we live our lives, a progress I’ve measured largely through 1. former New York Times head honcho Bill Keller’s decreasingly humiliating comments about Twitter and 2. this brilliantly droll smoker by Paul Ford, who writes about social media’s arrival the way some people write about coming to terms with their mortality. I don’t think the tone in Ford’s essay would have been possible even last year, which is what makes it so definitive of the moment, and it has that David Foster Wallace quality of articulating deep feelings about a phenomenon I didn’t quite realize I’d felt and certainly never could have expressed so wonderfully.
Levé was a photographer, but right before he committed suicide in 2007, he wrote a book called, um, “Suicide.” His prose here, distracted and fissiparous, reads like a kind of literary pointillism: Each individual fleck doesn’t make much sense on its own, but by the end the mass agglomerates into something dark and quite beautiful. It’s like tossing through a box of unsorted and unmarked photographs to deduce the life of the man who shot them — and damn, what a life it must’ve been.
I’m still not sure what to make of Grantland, but I liked it a lot more after I read this oral history of The National, which was an national sports daily with huge ambitions whose collapse read like something out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novella set in contemporary New York. In a lot of ways, The National is Grantland’s forebear, and so if Grantland doesn’t work out, the least we could hope for would be an autopsy as funny as this one.
Over the summer, I reported on a Libyan-American trapped in Libya during the civil war. He’d grown up there, and after he escaped, we became friends. On the day Qaddafi died, I texted him to see if he’d heard — he lived in a van because he didn’t have any money, and nor did he have a TV — and I didn’t hear back. While walking through a park later, he told me that when he got my text about Qaddafi, he sat down and didn’t move for several hours. It’s tough to explain how deeply Qaddafi had engrained himself into Libyan psyches, creating a distortion field where it was impossible to imagine existence without him. While walking, I told him about the New Yorker and how it writes these comprehensive takes on a subject that often become the final word, and I told him we could expect something from the New Yorker on Qaddafi. And shortly later, there it came: A brilliant postmortem by Jon Lee Anderson to explain the man-cum-phenomenon. My friend had trouble finishing it because it hit so close to home, and that’s what great journalism should do.
This monster on the deep unhappiness behind the contemporary gaming experience came at me from out of nowhere a few months ago, and it hasn’t left me since. I still have questions about it, actually: How much is real? How much is fiction? In the end, the particulars didn’t matter so much as the dark way Rogers captures the Pavlovian sickness behind games created by companies like Zynga, whose games thrive by creating an itch in users rather than aiming for real joy.
One of these days, after The Big One hits, we’re going to wish we’d stuck more narrative writers on the tech beat to explain the malevolent 1s and 0s secretly undermining our lives online and, increasingly, our relationship with the world at large. There will always be the Nicholas Schmidles to write the Osama bin Laden takedown (which might’ve been on this list if not for transparency qualms), but the day is soon coming where our most important national security enforcers write code instead of rappelling out of helicopters — if they aren’t already. Zetter’s piece is a brilliant argument that that day has already come. (Bonus points for Wired’s visual presentation of the story.)
They blindfolded us and stuffed us into a small sedan, three tall people with their hands bound behind them. This is what they mean by a “stress position,” I remember thinking. I don’t know how long that ride lasted—two hours, three?—but it seemed longer. The car’s sound system played a somber remix of Qaddafi’s famous “zenga zenga” speech—in which he pledged to purge Libya “alley by alley”—set to the martial theme of the movie 300. At the point in the speech when the Leader rhetorically demands “Who are you?” the guard who was riding shotgun instructed us, “Say it, say Qaddafi.” “Qaddafi,” I mumbled.
The president answered these arguments himself. According to one participant’s summary, Obama said: Look, the question of who rules Libya is probably not a vital interest to the United States. The atrocities threatened don’t compare to atrocities in other parts of the world, I hear that. But there’s a big “but” here. First of all, acting would be the right thing to do, because we have an opportunity to prevent a massacre, and we’ve been asked to do it by the people of Libya, their Arab neighbors and the United Nations. And second, the president said, failing to intervene would be a “psychological pendulum, in terms of the Arab Spring, in favor of repression.” He concluded: “Just signing on to a no-fly zone so that we have political cover isn’t going to cut it. That’s not how America leads.” Nor, he added, is it the “image of America I believe in.”
The president answered these arguments himself. According to one participant’s summary, Obama said: Look, the question of who rules Libya is probably not a vital interest to the United States. The atrocities threatened don’t compare to atrocities in other parts of the world, I hear that. But there’s a big “but” here. First of all, acting would be the right thing to do, because we have an opportunity to prevent a massacre, and we’ve been asked to do it by the people of Libya, their Arab neighbors and the United Nations. And second, the president said, failing to intervene would be a “psychological pendulum, in terms of the Arab Spring, in favor of repression.” He concluded: “Just signing on to a no-fly zone so that we have political cover isn’t going to cut it. That’s not how America leads.” Nor, he added, is it the “image of America I believe in.”
It’s been an amazing experience. One would not choose to go through it, but I’ve gone through it. It happened. My time came, I guess. From the very moment that I stood on that land mine, that morning on Oct. 23, 2010, I was pretty pragmatic about the whole thing. So many people had been killed around me — friends dying at my feet, no exaggeration — that when it happened to me, I was like: “O.K. My number came up. It’s time to move on.” And here I am, nine months later. I’m standing upright, seeing a lot of wonderful faces looking at me, and it’s an absolute pleasure. It’s been a rough time for the industry. This April in particular was pretty bad. We lost three friends, Tim, Chris and Anton. As it turned out, Libya was a pretty harsh mistress — not only for the foreign expat journalists working there, but for local journalists, too.
Until now, drone aircraft have been confined largely to war zones—most recently in Libya—and they have become controversial for killing civilians along with insurgents. But critics and boosters alike say unmanned aircraft will increasingly be used for peacetime work. They disagree about the likely scale of the industry, but the Federal Aviation Administration is already considering new rules and training staffers to adjust to unmanned aircraft in U.S. airspace. “It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” says Peter Singer, an analyst with the Brookings Institution. “Is it going to be 2012 or 2014? The point is, it’s going to happen.”
His wife and their two young daughters were in Virginia, he explained, but he and his two sons were in Libya, doing whatever they could for the revolution. While Osama was driving his improvised ambulance, his younger son, Yousef, a seventeen-year-old high-school student who was living in Benghazi with a relative, was taking part in the rallies held daily in front of the revolution’s headquarters, a beat-up courthouse on the city’s seafront promenade.
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