Selected Reportage

With support from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, I produced a package of stories on the long-lasting effects of U.S. Cold War intervention on politics in Guyana, a former British colony on the northeastern shoulder of South America.

Risker, Risk
The Caribbean Review of Books, July 2015
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CIA Meddling, Race Riots and a Phantom Death Squad: Why a tiny South American country can’t escape the ugly legacies of its idiosyncratic past.
Foreign Policy, July 31, 2015
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Of Love and Other Demographics
Warscapes, June 11, 2015
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‘Dougla’ Politics
Warscapes, June 15, 2015
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The Terror and the Time
Pulitzer Center Blog, August 4, 2015

 

“Should My People Need Me”

My profile of Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi runs on the cover of Ms. Magazine’s Winter 2012 issue. The woman who has long personified the fight for democracy and human rights in Burma has finally decided to engage with one of the world’s most repressive regimes. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate is running for a seat in a parliament created by the military junta that put her under house arrest for almost two decades, after stealing an election from her. Read about the challenges facing her as she attempts a shift from moral icon to politician. As she told Congressman Bill Richardson in 1994, “I look upon myself as a politician, and that isn’t a dirty word, is it, Congressman?”

 

Nativists Get A Tea-Party Makeover

The Minutemen were the largest border vigilante group in the country before financial scandals and criminal violence tore the group apart. Now former leaders are bringing their anti-immigrant politics inside the Tea Party. Read my piece for The Nation
Read “On the Migrant Trail,” my dispatch from the U.S.-Mexico border for The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund. I spent a day in the desert with the Samaritans Patrol and took this photo of the border wall in Sasabe, Arizona.

 

A Far Right Party Makes a Mainstream Bid

The whites-only BNP, founded in 1982 as a breakaway from the neo-Nazi National Front, has been trying to shed its nutter image as part of a bid for respectability in mainstream politics. Read my pieces about the far-right for GlobalPost. Part One: A Far-Right Party Makes a Bid for the Mainstream and Part Two: How Britain’s All-White Party Gained Its Following.

 

Survival Sex

Sajida can’t talk openly about what war and displacement have forced her to do. She banters with male customers at the cafe where she works in Damascus, Syria. But the men want more from this 43-year old divorced mother of two, a refugee from Iraq. And she can’t refuse; her boss has seized her passport. “I am a slave in his hands,” Sajida says.

Continue reading my piece about Sajida and other Iraqi refugees forced into prostitution in Syria in Ms. Magazine’s Summer 2008 issue.

You can also listen to an interview about the article at 9 minutes past the hour on Doug Clifford’s Hour of Hope.

 

The Keys to the Keystone State

When Barack Obama went bowling in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on March 29, his opponent was Senator Bob Casey Jr., the son and namesake of a popular former governor whose coal-mining pedigree had made him a hero of the white working class. Casey Junior had just endorsed Obama, and the presidential candidate, wearing blue-and-white Velcro shoes and a tie, bowled gutter ball after gutter ball and lost the game. But Obama wasn’t at Pleasant Valley Lanes to knock down pins; he was there to win over white blue-collar voters and thus prove to Democrats that he is “electable” in November.

In the iconography of the campaign, bowling might have been a bid for some cred with the white working class, but it also signifies community ties of the kind eulogized by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone. Putnam mourned the fact that while more Americans are bowling, fewer are doing so in leagues, a sign of a breakdown in civic bonding and engagement. Recently, Putnam put forward evidence that diversity hurts social capital: that residents of mixed-race communities trust one another less, volunteer less, vote less and hunker down more in front of their televisions. Whether or not Putnam’s dystopian theory holds true will be crucial to Obama’s chances in Pennsylvania and perhaps in a general election contest against John McCain. Do people in checkerboard communities turn inward and away from one another, and does that make them more susceptible to campaigning that plays on racial and ethnic divisions?

Bowling for Pennsylvania, my piece for The Nation, explores this question.