In the November Atlantic, a short profile of my friend Shaikh Hassan al Burji (pictured here with his very cute kids, Ja’afar and Sara).
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Category: Atlantic Monthly
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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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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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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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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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Nazis in Paraguay
A series of blog posts investigating fugitive Nazis in Paraguay is up at The Atlantic.
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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Leaving Iraq
Over at The Atlantic, I wrote a cycle about returning to Iraq in the run-up to the US withdrawal from Iraqi cities.
Graeme Wood 