Author: gcaw

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Atlantic Monthly

Bovine Intervention

An article on dairy training in Iraq.  September 2009 Atlantic.

SINCE MID-2009, Lockie Gary has lived part-time on a Marine base in Fallujah and led a series of seminars that aim to train insurgents’ widows to become milkmaids. On this hot June day, he is in a makeshift classroom in a rural technical school, addressing five quiet but curious students. Cows and humans have many of the same needs, Gary tells his students, and when cows are stressed, they give less milk. “The same things that cause you stress will stress your cows,” he says, and waits for an interpreter to translate. “What stresses you?”

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Atlantic Monthly

Does Bob Dylan Talk Like a Finn?

A dispatch from Hibbing, Minnesota, over at The Atlantic.

In July, residents of Long Branch, New Jersey, called the cops to report an “eccentric-looking old man” snooping around their neighborhood. Neither the residents nor Kristie Buble, the 22-year-old responding officer, recognized him as Bob Dylan, out for a stroll before a concert with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. The police escorted Dylan to his hotel, where tour staff positively identified Dylan as the Voice of a Generation, though evidently not of Buble’s.

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Atlantic Monthly

Sugar Humps

Martin van Almsick gave me a tour of his chocolate factory in Dubai, where he manages the production of the world’s first camel-milk chocolate.  Read about it at the Atlantic food channel.

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Leonard Lopate Show

Geo-engineering on Lopate

Today’s Leonard Lopate Show featured a segment about geo-engineering.

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Atlantic Monthly

The Lost World

I spent much of this summer with Canadian, Afghan, British, and US forces in southern Afghanistan. Here are some of the resulting dispatches.

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Atlantic Monthly

Nazis in Paraguay

A series of blog posts investigating fugitive Nazis in Paraguay is up at The Atlantic.

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Barnes & Noble Review

In the Graveyard of Empires

A review of Seth G. Jones’s In the Graveyard of Empires, in the Barnes & Noble Review.

 

A few years ago, the Turkish defense minister bragged that the Turkish contingent in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had finished an entire tour in Afghanistan’s Wardak province without firing a shot. To some, including his intended audience of Turks, this boast was cause for approval and appreciation. To others — presumably the battle-weary American soldiers who complained bitterly that ISAF had come to stand for I Saw Americans Fight — the boast demonstrated all that was wrong or bogus about the NATO effort in Afghanistan, and epitomized the woes that the Americans would eventually have to redouble their efforts to repair. 

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Atlantic Monthly Dallas Morning News

Re-Engineering the Earth

A survey of geo-engineering solutions to climate change, in the July/August Atlantic.

IF WE WERE transported forward in time, to an Earth ravaged by catastrophic climate change, we might see long, delicate strands of fire hose stretching into the sky, like spaghetti, attached to zeppelins hovering 65,000 feet in the air. Factories on the ground would pump 10 kilos of sulfur dioxide up through those hoses every second. And at the top, the hoses would cough a sulfurous pall into the sky. At sunset on some parts of the planet, these puffs of aerosolized pollutant would glow a dramatic red, like the skies in Blade Runner. During the day, they would shield the planet from the sun’s full force, keeping temperatures cool—as long as the puffing never ceased.

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