William Langewiesche

It wouldn’t be easy. But it wouldn’t be impossible. A reporter travels the world to find the weaknesses a terrorist could exploit

First Pakistan's A.Q. Khan showed that any country could have made a nuclear bomb. Then he showed—not once but three times—why the nuclear trade will never be shut down

How A. Q. Khan made Pakistan a nuclear power—and showed that the spread of atomic weapons can't be stopped

When Saddam Hussein goes on trial, he will not lack for legal defenders. Heading his team at the moment is a man named Ziad al-Khasawneh

Fear and lodging in Iraq

One woman has spent decades documenting crimes against humanity in Iraq. Now Saddam and his circle are facing justice

Life in the wilds of a city without trust

The American bubble in Baghdad

One of the worst maritime disasters in European history took place a decade ago. It remains very much in the public eye. On a stormy night on the Baltic Sea, more than 850 people lost their lives when a luxurious ferry sank below the waves. From a mass of material, including official and unofficial reports and survivor testimony, our correspondent has distilled an account of the Estonia's last moments—part of his continuing coverage for the magazine of anarchy on the high seas

The right way to think about our space program

The inside story of the investigation—and the catastrophe it laid bare

Part Three: The Dance of the Dinosaurs After nine months of unrivaled access to the disaster site, our correspondent tells the inside story of the recovery effort. This is the final installment in a three-part series.

Part Two: The Rush to RecoverAfter nine months of unrivaled access to the disaster site, our correspondent tells the inside story of the recovery effort. This is the second installment in a three-part series.

Part One: The Inner WorldAfter nine months of unrivaled access to the disaster site, our correspondent tells the inside story of the recovery effort. This is the first installment in a three-part series.

If you like extreme weather, the French island of Ouessant is a good place to find it

Two years afterward the U.S. and Egyptian governments are still quarreling over the cause—a clash that grows out of cultural division, not factual uncertainty. A look at the flight data from a pilot's perspective, with the help of simulations of the accident, points to what the Egyptians must already know: the crash was caused not by any mechanical failure but by a pilot's intentional act

Every six months the Pentagon sends nearly 4,000 soldiers to Bosnia and brings nearly 4,000 soldiers home. To see how it's done is to understand why keeping peace has become harder than waging war—and why the Pax Americana has stretched the mighty American military to the limit

One of the most polluted cities in America learns to capitalize on its contamination

The plot contains elements of Lost Horizon and Heart of Darkness, Fitzcarraldo and The Tempest. After making a fortune as founder of North Face and Esprit, Douglas Tompkins embraced the principles of deep ecology. Then, forsaking civilization, he bought a Yosemite-sized piece of wilderness in Chile, where only he and a like-minded few would live. They intended to show the world how an eco-community could flourish even as the ancient forest was kept pristine. Tompkins ran into one big problem: other people

As a reconstruction of this terrible crash suggests, in complex systems some accidents may be "normal"—and trying to prevent them all could even make operations more dangerous