Faculty

A professional journalist for more than three decades, I first started out as a stringer in Moscow during the last years of the USSR.   Thanks to the great fortune of winning an Alicia Patterson fellowship, I spent a year reporting from the war zones of the former Soviet lands and Afghanistan.   I spent the next six years based in Moscow, covering Russia and the ex-USSR as a staff correspondent for TIME magazine. I've written three award-winning books of investigative nonfiction:

BLACK EARTH is a history of Russia’s first post-Soviet decade, as told by way of a travelogue to the furthest points of the compass: North to the Arctic city of Norilsk, South to Chechnya, East to the Island of Sakhalin, and West to St. Petersburg. 

THE LOST SPY is part history, part detective story--a biography of Isaiah "Cy" Oggins, a 1920s American Communist turned Soviet spy. In 1947, after eight years in the Gulag, Oggins was "liquidated"--murdered in Moscow, by lethal injection, on Stalin's personal orders. 

MORGENTHAU, an epic spanning four generations, offers a panaromatic portrait of one family across more than 150 years of U.S. and world history, revealing their power and influence in the most consequential presidencies of the 20th century: the administrations of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. 

BLACK EARTH and THE LOST SPY were named to a number of Best-Books-of-the-Year lists, including those of The New York Public Library, NPR, The Washington Post,  The Los Angeles Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. 

MORGENTHAU: Privilege, Power, and the Rise of American Dynasty was published by Random House in 2023, and was named a "Book of the Year" by The New Yorker magazine and a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice."  MORGENTHAU, as well as BLACK EARTH, were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

In addition, for many years I've been a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, where I write on U.S. and foreign affairs.   My work has also appeared in numerous national and international publications, including Harper’s, National Geographic, The New Republic,  The New York Times Book Review, Outside, Politico, The Washington Post, and WIRED.

A commentator on the BBC, CNN, and NPR, I've also reported and written for PBS documentaries, including a Bill Moyers Special on 9/11.

At Lang, my interest lies in creating a classroom not of pre-professional journalists, but of critical readers and writers. The emphasis is not on acquiring skills, but learning craft—through writing, rewriting and more rewriting.   As a co-founder of our pioneering Journalism + Design program, I've enjoyed opening the classroom to as wide a spectrum of media as possible—from documentaries to photojournalism to music. As a working journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker, teaching has been a boon to my work beyond the classroom.  More than any single publication or editor, the undergraduates I’ve encountered at The New School have helped to restore my faith in the practice and purpose of journalism in America.

BA, (M.A.) Russian Language & Literature, Oxford University.

BA, College of Letters, Wesleyan University.

• MORGENTHAU: Privilege, Power, and the Rise of an American Dynasty (Random House, 2022; PB, 2023)
• BLACK EARTH: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall (WW Norton, 2004)
• CHECHNYA: To the Heart of A Conflict (WW Norton, 2005)
• THE LOST SPY: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service (WW Norton, 2008)