Two book review essays

After neglecting this website for awhile, a recent technical mishap required me to pay attention to it again to fix it (with help once again from my friend John Musser of Digerati Designs). That’s a good opportunity to take note of two book-review essays I wrote as a freelancer for publications other than The New York Times.

Last month, The New Republic published my piece pegged to two books about intelligence-style work outside of government. One is We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins. The other is Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier. TNR headlined this piece “The Rise of Private Spies: What happens when online investigators and detectives-for-hire take on intelligence work?

In October, The Nation published my piece pegged to Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker, a book about his failed quest to used FOIA to prove his suspicion that the United States has been covering up some battlefield use of biological weapons in the Korean War. It was headlined “The Blacked-Out Line: Nicholson Baker in the labyrinths of American secrecy.”