How smartphones are changing a continent.

The surreal afterlife of the once-ascendant Dubai, where “the legacy of oil has made everything worthless.”

A first-person account of the author’s time spent volunteering with a group of Burmese activists in Thailand, who turn out to be not Korean but in fact Karen, members of Burma’s persecuted ethnic minority. In the course of her time there, they show her videos of their risky forays across the border, and she shows them MySpace.

The perilous routes through which information—video footage, secret documents, radio broadcasts—flow in and out of North Korea through its porous borders with China.

After nearly 15 years in a Peruvian prison, an American woman convicted of aiding a Marxist terrorist group finds parole in Lima full of contradictions.

First-person accounts from the 2004 siege of a Russian school in Beslan by Chechen terrorists.

One of most popular Libyan figures amongst Western intellectuals and democracy advocates is… Qaddafi’s second son, Saif.

A profile of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the Malibu-dwelling, “fantastically corrupt” dictator-in-waiting of Equatorial Guinea. Teodorin, as his friends call him, is considered by U.S. intelligence to be “an unstable, reckless idiot.”

Twenty-five years later, inside the Exclusion Zone.

A suitcase was smuggled from Spain to Mexico during the Spanish Civil War containing negatives from three photographers would later become legends and all die in war zones. The suitcase disappeared.

On Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, “the permanent revolutionary,” and his son Seif.

What Egypt learned from the students who overthrew Milosevic. “The Serbs are not the usual highly paid consultants in suits from wealthy countries; they look more like, well, cocky students. They bring a cowboy swagger. They radiate success. Everyone they teach wants to do what the Serbs did.”

The Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, drawn mostly from kidnapped children, has proved as elusive as it is barbaric.

The story of three months spent training reporters in Saudi Arabia, where the press is far from free. “I suspected that behind the closed gates of Saudi society there was a social revolution in the making. With some guidance, I thought, these journalists could help inspire change.”

An opinion piece on the structural causes of unrest in Egypt; the business fraternity, globalization, and the fate of Egyptian women.

On the Cairo knifing of 82-year-old Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz and its aftermath.

February 1st, 2011. Tahrir Square, Cairo.

Reporting from Kuwait on the week of its liberation, a brutal account of the atrocities committed during seven months of Iraqi occupation.

From the Greeks to George Lucas, 2,200 years of failure.

How a nation went bankrupt. “Ireland’s regress is especially unsettling because of the questions it raises about Ireland’s former progress: even now no one is quite sure why the Irish suddenly did so well for themselves in the first place.”

How a legally dubious FBI sting lured a pair of Russian hackers stateside.

Money from relatives abroad, the lifeline for many Afghani’s, moves primarily through small hawala</em exchanges, which shift currency through cellphones, fax lines, and trust. When money moves in Afghanistan, however, connections to the heroin trade and terrorist groups are never far.

A primer on Egypt’s political landscape.

What happened when the founder of North Face and Esprit bought a chunk of Chile the size of a small state, intending to live with a select group inside it and turn it case study for ecological preservation. It turned out, however, that Chileans didn’t really like that idea.

On the illusion of the inevitable and the revolutions that ended the Eastern Bloc.