Activity

I’ll never forget the exhilaration in a battalion briefing room as forward-deployed Drug Enforcement Agency operatives crowed about their latest opium raid and burning of poppy fields. And it took a while for these memories to hark back to triumphant newspaper headlines or TV news segments of polic…

The list of questions never asked bends toward the infinite: What were the mercenaries I kept meeting truly there for? The ones who couldn’t help letting me know how much they were making for a six-month stint? The ones who kept on bragging about raking in six figures, and how those numbers always …

I didn’t think much of any of this at the time, during either my hurried excursion in 2009 or my extended stay in 2006 and 2007. This was how it was, this is how it had been for a while, and I had yet to allow myself to explore the haunting realities hiding behind such a thin layer of bureaucratic …

Our privileged classes, elite and haute bourgeois alike, don’t really need to produce men who are rapists, any more than they need to produce men who are good at soccer or football or lacrosse. What they need to produce are men who win contests, who modulate effortlessly between competing against t…

In her 1990 book Fraternity Gang Rape, the anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday notes, “I did not use the word ‘fraternity’ in the title to refer to fraternities generally as an institution. The phrase ‘fraternity gang rape’ refers to bonding through sex. . . . I use the word ‘fraternity’ . . . to me…