Mark Bowden is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, and a best-selling author. His book Black Hawk Down, a finalist for the National Book Award, was the basis of the film of the same name. His book Killing Pablo won the Overseas Press Club's 2001 Cornelius Ryan Award as the book of the year. Among his other books are Guests of the Ayatollah, an account of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, which was listed by Newsweek as one of "The 50 Books for Our Times." His most recent books are The Best Game Ever, the story of the 1958 NFL championship game; Worm, which tells the story of the Conficker computer worm, based on the article "The Enemy Within," published in this magazine; The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden; and Huế 1968.
Mark has received The Abraham Lincoln Literary Award and the International Thriller Writers' True Thriller Award for lifetime achievement, and served as a judge for the National Book Awards in 2005. He is a 1973 graduate of Loyola University Maryland, where he also taught from 2001-2010. A reporter and columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer for more than 30 years, Bowden is now an adjunct professor at The University of Delaware and lives in Oxford, Pennsylvania. He is married with five children and two granddaughters.
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KCNA via Reuters What Did North Korea's Missile Test Really Change?
When potential death tolls are unthinkably high, it’s like multiplying infinity.
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Donald Trump Is Less Predictable Than Kim Jong Un
Mark Bowden argues that the president is more likely to start a nuclear war than his adversary in North Korea.
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How North Korea Became a Crisis
To understand how the standoff between Pyongyang and the world became so dire, it helps to go back to the country's founding
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Justin Metz 朝核困局：当今最棘手的问题
对付朝鲜无上策可言，只有下策与下下策之分
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Justin Metz How to Deal With North Korea
There are no good options. But some are worse than others.
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The Arrogance of Mitt
The recent Romney documentary succeeds in making its subject more human, but it also makes it clear that the country is better off without him as president.
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Nishant Choksi In Praise of Fancy Words
The pleasures of reading with a dictionary by one’s side
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Reuters What Snowden and Manning Don't Understand About Secrecy
Government often finds bad reasons to keep information hidden, but the recent indiscriminate leaks are foolish.
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Khaled Abdullah/Reuters/Corbis The Killing Machines
How to think about drones
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Library of Congress 'Idiot,' 'Yahoo,' 'Original Gorilla': How Lincoln Was Dissed in His Day
The difficulty of recognizing excellence in its own time
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'Zero Dark Thirty' Is Not Pro-Torture
Saying Kathryn Bigelow's film advocates for "enhanced interrogation" ignores the nuances of the story.
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Grant Delin The Measured Man
Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist turned computer scientist, has a new project: charting his every bodily function in minute detail. What he’s discovering may be the future of health care.
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Dumb Kids’ Class
The benefits of being underestimated by the nuns at St. Petronille’s
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Wilk The Man Who Broke Atlantic City
Don Johnson won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. Not long before that, he’d taken the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. Here’s how he did it.
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Brian Stauffer Rebirth of the Guinea Hens
The author’s fowl defy the blogosphere and stage a comeback.
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Michelle Asselin/Contour by Getty Images The Salesman
Experienced, emotional, marked by personal tragedy and political setback, Joe Biden is in many ways the antithesis of the president he serves. But his stock has risen steadily in the West Wing, and with the Democrats poised to lose much of their leverage in the midterm elections, the vice president’s unique skills and attributes may prove ever more crucial to his administration’s success.
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Alex Ostroy The Enemy Within
When the Conficker computer “worm” was unleashed on the world in November 2008, cyber-security experts didn’t know what to make of it. It infiltrated millions of computers around the globe. It constantly checks in with its unknown creators. It uses an encryption code so sophisticated that only a very few people could have deployed it. For the first time ever, the cyber-security elites of the world have joined forces in a high-tech game of cops and robbers, trying to find Conficker’s creators and defeat them. The cops are failing. And now the worm lies there, waiting …
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The Great Guinea Hen Massacre
Good intentions collide with dumb birds on a small farm in Pennsylvania.
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Stephen Webster/Wonderful Machine The Story Behind the Story
With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward to provide the “reporting” that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition. A case-study of our post-journalistic age.
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Flight Risk
When a U.S. company ignored pilot warnings in Colombia, four Americans died, and three were taken captive
