John Powers

Under the Goat

Illustration by Peter Bennett Looking chubbier and more rumpled than I’d ever seen him, Mario Vargas Llosa turned up on Charlie Rose last week to promote his novel, The Feast of the Goat, about the Dominican Republic during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. As usual, Charlie seemed not to have......

Desert Foxes

During the Blitz, Edward R. Murrow became famous to millions of Americans for his eloquent rooftop broadcasts (“This . . . is London.”). But back then, media culture wasn’t all-devouring. As the bombs rained down on the East End, people didn‘t ask, “Gee, I wonder which reporter’s career will be......

Off

I don’t remember exactly when it happened — it was somewhere between our troops parachuting into Afghanistan and the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif — but one night my wife said, “You’re addicted to the war.” “No, I’m not,” I said and continued reading an article about the Bush family’s business ties......

The Rough Guide to Nicaragua

Ilustration by Peter Bennett Slate’s Robert Wright recently posed a tricky question of moral equivalence: “How many Afghan citizens is one American soldier worth?” In media terms, the equation is slightly different: If a handful of Americans get anthrax, does the rest of the world matter at all? Now, one......
article placeholder

Wicked Games

Like many of our reporters, he‘s from the region and has a strong accent. So you may want to listen a bit harder. --Judy Woodruff, CNN On September 11, everybody knew what the big story was. And in the month that followed, the news seemed to break into neatly compartmentalized......

Getting Lost Is Beautiful

To talk seriously about Lynch is to begin with his enthusiasms. “Look at this,” he says one hot August morning. He shows me a photograph of a dilapidated industrial building. “I took it last December in Lodz, Poland. I was at this film festival, Camerimage, and it was so much......

The Parent Trap

A couple of days after television turned into one vast Anthrax Channel (which didn’t make me feel any better about my head cold), my wife and I retreated into old-fashioned escapism. We watched Peyton Place, the 1957 potboiler about a small New England town bursting with teen pregnancy, rape and......

Bin Laden’s Basement Tape

Not long after President Bush finished his live White House speech announcing the strikes on Afghanistan, the networks began broadcasting the homemade concert video by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist supergroup. The whole thing was so perfectly timed that I half expected one of those little graphics to pop......

Crown Thy Good

Where were you when the age of irony crumbled to the ground? I was sitting in my kitchen innocently reading Time, when I was suddenly struck by the headline: “The Age of Irony Comes to an End.” Below was an essay by veteran sermonizer Roger Rosenblatt, who managed to find......

Media Fundamentalism

Late Saturday night, CNN carried a report from Pakistan, which was being dragooned into helping the United States hunt down the terrorists. A snippet of footage showed a band of students in the streets of Islamabad raising a banner written in English for international cameras. “America,” it read, “think why......