Journalism & Photojournalism

In the upcoming issue of the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh writes that the United States may be closer to armed conflict with Iran than previously imagined.

Journalist Pico Iyer has a long history meeting with the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet who lives in exile in India. Iyer joins Fresh Air to discuss how the Dalai Lama is responding to the current Tibetan uprising and protest against Chinese rule.

A journalist goes undercover to take all-expenses-paid, round-the-world sex tour in Willing. That's the newest novel from Scott Spencer, author of Endless Love.

Foreign correspondent Charles Sennot recently returned from Iraq, where he witnessed the U.S. military's "troop surge" first-hand as an embedded reporter with the Army's 28th Infantry Regiment.

The Library of America has published World War II Writings, a new collection of stories by A.J. Liebling. The volume, edited by Pete Hamill, includes three books, two dozen New Yorker pieces, maps and a chronology.

William F. Buckley, Jr., died Wednesday. He was 82. Fresh Air remembers the founder and longtime editor of the National Review with excerpts from a 1989 interview.

The cease-fire that's kept Shiite militias in check for months is in danger of unraveling. And some U.S.-backed Sunni militias are growing restless. Patrick Cockburn, author and Iraq correspondent for The Independent in London, offers observations on war in Iraq.

That guilty feeling after a big meal? It might be about more than calories and cholesterol. New Yorker science writer Michael Specter explains how carbon emissions released during food production are having an impact on the environment.

Clark Johnson has worked as a director on several of TV's most memorable cop shows, including The Shield, Homicide: Life on the Street and the pilot episode of the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire. This season, he's appearing on camera as well, as The Wire's City Editor Gus Haynes.

Investigative reporter David Cay Johnston explores in his new book how in recent years, government subsidies and new regulations have quietly funneled money from the poor and the middle class to the rich and politically connected.

We remember reporter Jack Newfield. He died at age 66 in New York. He was known as a muckraker and columnist. He wrote books on Robert F. Kennedy, Rudolph Giuliani and Don King. He wrote for The Village Voice, The Daily News, The New York Post and the New York Sun. In the 1960s, he was drawn to the civil rights movement. He traveled with Kennedy during the 1968 presidential campaign and was present at his assassination

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, a regular Fresh Air guest, joins us again to assess recent developments in his home country and to preview the upcoming election there. Born in Lahore and based in Pakistan, Rashid has written for The Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, London's Daily Telegraph and other publications. He's also the author of several best-selling books.

In a recent New York Times Magazine cover story, reporter Andrea Elliott explained how the small Moroccan neighborhood of Jamaa Mezuak has bred terrorists responsible for a number of recent high-profile attacks. Some were involved in the Madrid train bombings; some went to Iraq. Elliott won a Pulitzer Prize this year for her series An Imam in America.

Washington Post correspondent Thomas Ricks has recently returned from Iraq — where senior military commanders now say that the key threat facing the U.S.effort isn't terrorists, it's the intransigence of the Shia-dominated government.

Ricks, a regular Fresh Air guest, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the best-selling Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.

Over the course of eight years, Matthew Diffee has had more than 100 of his illustrations published in the cartoonists' bible, The New Yorker.

But that magazine gets more than 500 submissions a week — and for each issue, the editors select only 20 cartoons, in a process that Diffee says may or may not involve the use of darts.

So even Diffee has had to deal with rejection. Happily, he's found a channel: His new book, featuring his own work and that of 37 other New Yorker regulars, is The Rejection Collection, Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap.

She works in a country where reporters have been harassed, deported, jailed, even tortured. She's subject to all these risks herself — but Peta Thornycroft surrendered her British citizenship and became a Zimbabwean so she could remain in the country and continue to report on the challenges it faces. She's one of the few independent journalists still working in Zimbabwe.

Journalist James Fallows, a 25-year veteran of The Atlantic Monthly, is living in China and writing about it. He joins Dave Davies to discuss his recent article "China Makes, The World Takes" — and the booming Chinese factories that are its subject.

As host of the NPR news quiz Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, Peter Sagal spends a lot of time reading the newspaper.

Lately, though, he's also spent many an hour going to strip joints, a swingers club, a porn-movie set and casinos — among other dens of what some call iniquity.

All research, of course, for his new project, The Book of Vice. He wanted to get a perspective on the indulgences of others, and report back to the rest of us.

For 25 years, author and journalist Ahmed Rashid has covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

He files for English language papers including the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Telegraph. Based in Lahore, Rashid is the author of the bestselling books, Taliban and Jihad.

Canadian journalist Paul Watson won the 1994 Pulitizer Prize for his photograph of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu,Somalia. His war-zone work leaves him suffering from chronic post-traumatic stress, and he says the Mogadishu photo still haunts him. Watson has also reported from Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq; he earned three National Newspaper Awards for foreign reporting and photography while at the Toronto Star, and was recently posted to head The Los Angeles Times' Southeast Asia bureau in Jakarta, Indonesia.