My book The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State is out! Read an excerpt in The Atlantic here.
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The Way of the Strangers
Category: Atlantic Monthly
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What ISIS Really Wants
In The Atlantic.
With a follow-up here.
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How Gangs Took over Prisons
My latest, in the October Atlantic.
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The Future of College?
I wrote about Minerva University for the September Atlantic.
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Burmese Daze
Originally appeared in The Atlantic.
The Drug Elimination Museum, a brutalist eyesore about the size of Grand Central Station, occupies a weedy lot next to the state-television headquarters in Rangoon, Burma’s most important city. The building is silent and sepulchral, like a cavernous opium den whose patrons have set down their pipes and slipped into nap time. Since 2011, the military-allied government of Burma has softened restrictions on tourism, but hardly anyone seeks out this particular attraction. A mile and a half away is the golden spire of Shwedagon Pagoda, the foremost Buddhist monument in Burma and an architectural, aesthetic, and spiritual must-see. But for fans of irony and unintentional humor, this vast temple of propaganda should be a pilgrimage site in its own right.
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The Defector
I profiled Charles Robert Jenkins, a US soldier who defected to North Korea, in The Atlantic.
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The Atheist Who Strangled Me
I interviewed and profiled Sam Harris in The Atlantic.
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Hyperinflation Vacation
I traveled to hyperinflationary Iran for The Atlantic.
Graeme Wood 