On November 2, 1963, South Vietnamese military officers murdered their president of nine years, Ngo Dinh Diem, and took control of the nation’s government. The American hand was invisible at the time, but regime change came to fruition only because of active encouragement by the U.S. ambassador, who believed that a coup would improve South

I know nothing about primate anthropology, but I did know a primate anthropologist. She took me into the rainforests of southern Uganda, where we spent several afternoons lurking in the shrubbery and watching a troop of chimpanzees. When we got too close to the mothers and babies, the males chimped out. They got up on

George Orwell, in his immortal 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature,” delineates a distinction between two types of attackers of intellectual freedom, both real but one in a sense more real than the other. “On the one side,” he writes, “are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical

Writing a novel after spending years writing nonfiction is no easy trick. Trust me, I know. My hard drive is littered with stories never shared. My next book, if I do finish it, will be another nonfiction tome. Completing a novel, or even a novella, feels to me a bit like becoming a ballet dancer