Don’t worry, my website hasn’t been hacked. The headline for this post is the Russian title of Crude World. The Russian roughly translates as “Cruel World: The Severe Decline of the Oil Era,” which is a bit different from the original wording in English. If you’d like to purchase a copy, it’s published by United Press and goes for 396 rubles; click here for the link.

Okay, the headline is a bit of an exaggeration, but not entirely. Angelina Jolie has just come out with a new movie about the Bosnian war that she wrote and directed, In the Land of Blood and Honey. She’s being sued by an obscure writer who accuses her of stealing the plot of his book about Bosnia. In an interview published yesterday by the Los Angeles Times, Jolie said she had never seen the aggrieved writer’s book and had relied on other books for inspiration, including (yes, yes) Love Thy Neighbor. I had no idea about this until a reporter for TMZ called today to ask whether I had any problems with Jolie’s use of my book. Of course I’m delighted. It gives me an excuse to post a picture of her on my otherwise non-glamorous blog.

Remember the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Last year it captivated America’s attention as nearly five million barrels of oil gushed into the water, but once the runaway well was capped, the outrage faded away. As I write in a story in The New York Review of Books, drilling has resumed in the area, tourists are back on the beaches, and even Tony Hayward, forced to step down as BP’s CEO, is back in the action, running a multi-billion dollar investment fund. But a spate of reports and books provide a trove of data that reveals how the oil and gas industry remains as unaccountable as the too-big-to-fail banks that brought on the financial crisis of 2008. The BP disaster revealed the same problems—lax government regulation, corporate profits despite the risks, a fawning press—that characterized the financial meltdown. Big banks and big oil have more in common than their size.

How can you turn $3.2 billion into $500 billion in a day? That’s the question I ask in a post on the New York Review of Book’s blog. The answer, if you are Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, and Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon, is that you announce a deal that allows Exxon to explore for oil in Russia’s Arctic waters. According to Putin, who last week said, “It’s scary to utter such huge figures,” the deal could reach $500 billion. According to Exxon’s news release, all that’s been agreed so far is an investment of $3.2 billion. The only certainty is that the energy industry’s numbers game sometimes resembles the magical calculations the financial industry relied on before the 2008 crash. For more, click here.

Earlier this year I wrote a lengthy story for The New Yorker about the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003; the story was, among other things, a study of how the media tends to substitute a photogenic minority for a less-photogenic multitude, even if the minority does not represent the multitude. I’ve just written a short online-only piece for The New Yorker about the same topic, focusing this time on the celebrations in America over the killing of Osama bin Laden. The raucous and photogenic gatherings of college students were not, I argue, representative of a more-sober reaction among the majority of Americans, yet they dominated coverage of the country’s reaction. The visuals were fantastic; the journalism, less so.

The world’s first icons, predating the era of mass reproduction, originated in times when it was at least theoretically possible to smash every painting of a religious figure or tear down every statue of a potentate. That’s no longer possible. As the uprisings in the Middle East show, the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, along with the eternal life the Internet grants to digital imagery, is reshaping the form and impact of political iconography. Hosni Mubarak will not be the last dictator to suffer the consequences. My thoughts on the subject are in a video-studded posting at NewYorker.com. The text-only version is here.

CNN’s Ben Wedemen is doing an amazing job in Libya (as he has done in other countries in the Mideast). This piece from Benghazi is just about as memorable as a liberation clip can be. If the link on the video doesn’t work, click here for the video on CNN’s site.

As most news organizations slash their funding of photojournalism, photographers are turning to the crowd for financing. Take a look at emphas.is and kickstarter (here’s a link to Larry Towell’s crowd-funded project) and these smart posts by Tomas van Houtryve and David Campbell. Interesting times indeed.

My new story, which reconstructs the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square on April 9, 2003, is in The New Yorker. It’s a lengthy article that I’ve worked on for quite a while, with support from ProPublica and the Shorenstein Center on the Press. As a companion of sorts to the story, I’ve created a new section of my website that is a collection of photos, videos, documents and links related to the article; just click here to visit it. (Photo by Alexandra Boulat/VII)

If you want to see the best collection of oil photos from around the world that I’ve ever seen, pick up the current issue of 8 Magazine. True, the “Empire” chapter of Crude World is excerpted in the issue, but that’s honestly not why I’m touting it. The pictures, from photographers like Christopher Anderson, Ed Kashi, Rena Effendi, Christian Lutz and Kael Alford, are tremendous. The issue’s cover photo was shot by Lutz and shows the 2009 New Year’s Eve party at the Lagos Yacht Club.

Do your cellphone or gas tank contain natural resources that were pillaged from conflict-ridden countries? It’s quite possible, and that’s why law professor James G. Stewart has written an innovative blueprint for prosecuting corporations that pillage (the legal term) natural resources from the developing world. To download the blueprint, which was published with the help of the Open Society Justice Intiative, click here.

In 2005 I wrote a cover story for the NYT Magazine about abuses committed by Iraqi troops working with American forces. These sorts of abuses—Iraqi on Iraqi, as Americans watched—are a major issue in the new batch of Wikileaks documents. I talked with the Guardian in their new video on the issue.
Update: I also talked about it on NPR’s Morning Edition.

I’m doing a talk in Austin at the University of Texas on Oct. 28, for which the organizers have created a compelling flyer.

You get the financial collapse of 2008 and, as an excellent Wall Street Journal story shows, you get the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Both disasters stemmed from the U.S. government’s willingness to hand over regulation duties to the industries that the government was supposed to be regulating.

If you appreciate odd architecture from another era and another place, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are filled with war monuments that always leave an impression. Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers visited the striking Tito-era war monuments that dot the former Yugoslavia and has published his work in a new book, Spomenik. The monument that’s featured in this photo is from Krusevo. More info on the Kempenaers book at romapublications.org. A commentary on the photos was recently posted at foto8.

George Monbiot on the environmental movement’s failure to reduce climate-warming emissions via national or international agreements:

To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a fantasy of benign paternalistic power – acting, though the political mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider interests of humankind. We allowed ourselves to believe that, with a little prompting and protest, somewhere, in a distant institutional sphere, compromised but decent people would take care of us. They won’t. They weren’t ever going to do so. So what do we do now? I don’t know. These failures have exposed not only familiar political problems, but deep-rooted human weakness. All I know is that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political reality we’ve sought to avoid. The conversation starts here.

The Wall Street Journal runs a weekly column in which an author lists the five best books on a particular subject. The Journal invited me to write the column this week. My five best books on oil are (drum roll…) Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company, Anthony Sampson’s The Seven Sisters, Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, Abdeldrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and a Day. The story is posted on the Journal’s site and on mine.

My latest story, in New York magazine, focuses on the controversy over the so-called ground zero mosque. The piece draws on lessons of iconoclasm in the modern era, from the destruction of the World Trade Center to the demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station and the theft in 1911 of the Mona Lisa (more people lined up to see the empty spot where the stolen masterpiece had hung than visited the museum to see the actual artifact).  As the story says, “In a city with more than its share of famous buildings, one that doesn’t even exist has already become iconic. It is a modern alchemy of symbols in which the act of destruction doubles as an act of creation. The thing is, the opponents of the community center appear to have failed to understand the double-edged consequences of the preemptive iconoclasm they are trying to achieve.”

NPR’s always-excellent literary program, Fresh Air, features an interview with me today. Click here for audio and transcript.