David Quigg
Right now, just hours after someone detonated an improvised explosive device and killed four Canadian soldiers and one Canadian journalist in Afghanistan, I'm reflecting on words Canada's defense minister spoke back in March. Reacting to the pseudo-apology of a Fox News host who'd belittled Canada's ... Read More
The intellectual trap of exploring a new place — whether through actual travel or by reading a book set there — is the practically unconscious assumption that we can generalize. Having just finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, for example, I'm needing to remind myself that I have no fast ... Read More
I hope the New York Times will do a follow-up story on Friday's "G.I.’s in Iraq Hope to Heal Sacred Walls." The story — like an NPR broadcast in 2007 and a Smithsonian piece in 2008 — doesn't answer a question that hovers over the U.S. troops trying to restore Iraq's oldest Christian monastery: By ... Read More
The Good Soldiers is nearly unbearable. Relentlessly so. Commendably so. Whether you're a combat veteran, a soldier's mom, an Iraqi, the 43rd U.S. president, an ordinary American, or some pundit who likes to make bold, loud, baseless, unshakeable declarations about the glory or evil of war, reporter ... Read More
In a recent NPR interview, National Book Award finalist Daniyal Mueenuddin spoke with arresting candor about Pakistan, using the word "feudalism" to describe the structure of life in the Indus River Valley where his family owns land.This exchange between Mueenuddin and NPR host Steve Inskeep ... Read More
My dad read me Jack London's The Call of the Wild when I was nine. I graduated from high school in a city that makes a big deal of its Jack London Square. Still, my ignorance is such that I didn't know until last week that London once chose to live among England's poor, document the experience, and ... Read More
"The Most Failed State," a piece in The New Yorker's December 14 issue, scrutinizes Somalia and offers glimpses of the mix of nose-holding and open-mindedness U.S. leaders will need in Afghanistan if they're going to thin the ranks of the insurgency by getting "good Taliban" to defect.Somalia's ... Read More
Decoding the New Taliban, a book I blogged about once already, will probably find its way into more posts here because of its timeliness, depth, and variety of voices. The book's first chapter explores how drug money from Afghanistan's mammoth poppy harvest bankrolls the Taliban. What intrigued me ... Read More
As I've continued to use this blog to track the aftermath of a September massacre in west Africa, probably the most implausible claim from Guinea's coup leader has been his insistence that he had nothing to do with killings of civilians carried out by his own troops. Now, he's been shot himself, ... Read More
Just like the time Slate's Jacob Weisberg invited me to join his Mafia family, his latest tweet made me think some wiseass had hacked his Twitter account: "If you're looking for a hook-up in South Beirut, best to go through Hezbolllah." Still, I clicked the link and arrived at a Foreign Policy piece ... Read More
Reporting from Mexico for the December issue of the The Atlantic, author Philip Caputo writes that "drug trafficking and its attendant corruption are a malignancy that has spread into Mexico's lymph system."Caputo cites: • a Mexican law professor's conclusion that "17 of Mexico's 31 states have ... Read More
Graham Greene's The Quiet American and Antonio Giustozzi's Decoding the New Taliban — two books that I've started more or less simultaneously — are jostling in my brain. In the very first sentence of his introduction, Giustozzi writes words that might have come from one of the characters in Greene's ... Read More
I came home from Sunday night's thrilling Major League Soccer championship game sure that I would finish my weekend by writing about the explosive aftermath of the World Cup qualifying match between Egypt and Algeria. But I got diverted by glancing at Twitter, seeing this tweet, and reading a ... Read More
The story by Evelyn Theiss of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer has been online since Friday and I can't stop wondering how Vietnam will react to it. The headline: "My Lai photographer Ron Haeberle admits he destroyed pictures of soldiers in the act of killing." The story also ran on the Ohio paper's ... Read More
The new Atlantic magazine has an intriguing dispatch about how "Iranians line up daily to cross the Astara River to buy and sell jeans, chickens, bras, laptops—and often sex and schnapps and heroin." Their destination -- the Azerbaijani town of Astara -- amounts to "the Tijuana of the Caspian ... Read More
Maybe everyone else already knows this, but I was stunned to learn that an utterly pedestrian detail -- the reliability of translation services -- has hurt America's efforts to negotiate an end to the turmoil over North Korea's nuclear weapons. According to a report released this month by the Center ... Read More
My own presumptions about Pakistan did not prepare me for the sight of this, this, this, or any of Kate Brooks' other photos from Karachi's "fashion week" -- a glitzy event that, in the words of its organizer, can be seen as a "gesture of defiance to the Taliban."This blog, as I've explained, is ... Read More
Knowing full well that I tee myself up for easy, Whitney-Houston-themed ridicule, I'm here to say that the children are our future, and that childhood in the Gaza Strip -- a radicalized, blinkered, deprived existence, according to Lawrence Wright's humane report for The New Yorker -- bodes very ... Read More
Because government troops in Guinea massacred civilian protesters at about the same time as I started blogging for Big Think, I've committed myself to using this space to track events in that all-too-easily-forgotten piece of west Africa. A November 5 BBC radio report warns that the trauma of the ... Read More
One word haunts Seymour Hersh's new investigative piece about the potentially shaky security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal: "mutiny." As Hersh writes, "the Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny—that extremists inside the Pakistani ... Read More
About David Quigg
David Quigg is a writer and photographer. Before quitting newspaper journalism in 2003 to stay home with his newborn son and toddler daughter, David covered the World Trade Organization riots, politics, local government, and all things Seattle for The (Tacoma) News Tribune. In addition to Big Think, he now writes for The Huffington Post and his own blog, which he describes as "an undignified glimpse of the scattershot passions that, with any luck, will conspire to prevent me from ever serving as an expert panelist." He is the author of an unpublished novel, Void Where Prohibited.