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Journalism Fellows at The Nation Institute

The Journalism Fellowship Program was established in 1995 to enable prominent journalists to write on pressing and complex social issues free of the constraints of the mainstream media. We invite our fellows to contribute wherever possible to the independent media, thereby adding to the vitality and breadth of the alternative press. We also encourage our fellows to publish their work in a wide variety of magazines, newspapers and web-based resources, to pursue book projects and to appear in person as commentators, critics or analysts on radio and television formats. The current roster of Institute fellows includes Amy Alexander, Jonathan Schell, Gary Younge, Katha Pollitt, Jeremy Scahill, Pamela Newkirk and Chris Hedges, writing on fields ranging from labor to social justice to international affairs.

Featured Fellows

Naomi Klein

Fellow

Listen to Naomi Klein discuss crises and capitalism on Radio Nation this weekend.

Chris Hedges

Senior Fellow

Watch Chris Hedges discuss his latest book, Collateral Damage, on C-SPAN.

Amy Alexander

Alfred Knobler Fellow

Listen to Amy Alexander on Radio Nation and watch her on Democracy Now!

More Fellows

Amy Alexander

Alfred Knobler Fellow

Amy Alexander is a journalist, author and editor. She edited a book on the controversial Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan called The Farrakhan Factor (Grove, 1998). She is also the author of Fifty Black Women Who Changed America (Kensington, 1999), and more recently, of Lay My Burden Down (Beacon, 2000) with Alvin F. Poussaint, MD. Alexander is currently writing a book on race and the American press.


Bill Boyarsky

Fellow

Bill Boyarsky is the national political correspondent for Truthdig and author of the recently published Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and The Art of Power Politics, (University of California, 2007) named as one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. In his 31 years with the Los Angeles Times, he was a national political correspondent, a columnist and city editor. He also reported on state and local politics. He was a member of the Times teams that won three Pulitzer Prizes.


Joe Conason

Fellow

A highly experienced journalist, author and editor, Joe Conason has served as Director of the Nation Institute Investigative Fund since November 2006. The late Molly Ivins once described him as "one of the best investigative reporters in the country." Conason's most recent book is It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush (St. Martins, 2007), which The New York Review of Books called a "pithy…well-written account of an administration bent on establishing authoritarian executive power."


Lou Dubose

Fellow

Lou Dubose is the co-author, with the late Molly Ivins, of two New York Times bestselling Random House books about George W. Bush: Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush and Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America. His final collaboration with Ms. Ivins was Bill of Wrongs (Random House, 2007). He currently edits the semi-monthly Washington Spectator and divides his time between Austin, Texas and Washington, D.C.


Tom Engelhardt

Fellow

Tom Engelhardt created and runs TomDispatch.com, a project of The Nation Institute. He is the author of the recently updated The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts, 1998), a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, and a collection of his TomDispatch interviews, Mission Unaccomplished. He is also Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt, and the co-creator and co-editor of its American Empire Project series. His newest book is The World According to Tomdispatch (Verso).


Deepa Fernandes

Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow

Deepa Fernandes is a journalist and educator. She has produced award-winning radio features around the world for the BBC World Service and Pacifica Radio. Her features have ranged from the life of women in slums in her native India to the veggie revolution in Cuba. Her first book, Targeted: National Security and the Big Business of Immigration, was published in 2007. Fernandes is the founder and co-director of People's Production House, a national media justice training center headquartered in New York City.


Chris Hedges

Senior Fellow

Chris Hedges, a Nation Institute Senior Fellow, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism and received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. His latest book, Collateral Damage, co-authored with Laila Al-Arian and published by Nation Books, was released in June.


Naomi Klein

Fellow

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the New York Times and international bestseller, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Published worldwide in September 2007, it is set to be translated into 20 languages to date. Klein is also the author of the international bestseller No Logo (Picador, 2000). The book has been translated into 28 languages with more than a million copies in print. The New York Times called No Logo "a movement bible."


Lewis Lapham

Fellow

Lewis Lapham is the editor of a new quarterly publication on history and literature, Lapham's Quarterly, the National Correspondent for Harper's Magazine and the author of 13 books, among them Money and Class in America, The Wish for Kings, Theater of War and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire. For Bloomberg Radio he hosts a weekly program, The World in Time. His writing has appeared in Life, Commentary, Vanity Fair, National Review, Yale Literary Magazine, ELLE, Fortune, Forbes, American Spectator, The New York Times, The Observer (London), and The Wall Street Journal.


Bruce Mau

Fellow

Bruce Mau is the Chairman and CEO of Bruce Mau Design Inc. He founded his studio in 1985, concentrating at first on a single client. In 1995, Bruce Mau received considerable attention for the award-winning and critically acclaimed S,M,L,XL. This was followed in 2000 with Life Style, a book by Mau about his studio's practice. In 2004, Mau launched Massive Change, an ambitious, multi-venue exhibition on the possibilities of design culture. In 2007, Bruce was presented the AIGA Gold Medal in the field of communication design.


Pam Newkirk

Fellow

Pamela Newkirk, a former daily journalist, is an associate professor of journalism at New York University where she is director of the Urban Journalism Workshop. She is the author of Within the Veil (New York University, 2000), which won the 2001 National Press Club Award for media criticism. She more recently edited A Love No Less, (Doubleday, 2003) and is writing African American Life in Letters which is scheduled to be this fall.


Greg Palast

Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow

The author of two New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse, Greg Palast has broken several major stories for BBC, Harper's, The Nation and The Guardian regarding U.S. involvement in the coup d'état against Hugo Chavez and the secret U.S. State Department plans for the oil fields of Iraq and other stories. The Palast Report can be heard weekly on the Air America Radio network.


Paolo Pellegrin

Fellow

Paolo Pellegrin became a Magnum Photos nominee in 2001 and a full member in 2005. He is a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine. Pellegrin has won many awards, including eight World Press Photo and numerous POY Awards, a Leica Medal of Excellence, an Olivier Rebbot Award, the Hansel-Meith Preis and in 2007, the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award. In 2006 he was the recipient of the W. E. Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. He has published six books. Pellegrin was born in Rome in 1964 and now lives in New York and Rome.


Katha Pollitt

Shaffer Fellow

Katha Pollitt is the author of six books, three of which are collections of political essays and columns: Reasonable Creatures (Vintage, 1995); Subject to Debate (Modern Library, 2001); and Virginity or Death! (Random House, 2006). Her most recent book, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories, is a collection of personal essays (Random House, 2007). She is currently working on her next book of poetry, The Mind-Body Problem: And Other Poems.


Eugene Richards

Fellow

Eugene Richards is an award-winning photographer, writer and documentary filmmaker best known for his books and photo essays on topics from breast cancer and poverty to AIDS. He is the author of 13 books, most recently, The Fat Baby (Phaidon, 2004). The Blue Room, a collection of his photographs on abandoned houses and A Procession of Them, which confronts the plight of the institutionalized mentally disabled, will be published this fall. His current book project, War Is Personal, is a documentation in words and pictures of the effects of the Iraq War on the lives of a dozen individuals.


Jeremy Scahill

Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow

Jeremy Scahill is a Polk Award-winning investigative journalist. He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine, where he reports on Iraq war contractors. His New York Times best-selling book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army was published in 2007 by Nation Books. Alternet named it best progressive book of the year. Blackwater was recently released in a thoroughly revised and updated paperback edition.


Jonathan Schell

Senior Fellow

Jonathan Schell is the author of 13 books. The most recent is The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of the Nuclear Danger. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine from 1967 to 1987. He is now a visiting lecturer at Yale University. Schell's other books include The Fate of the Earth (Knopf, 1982), which first appeared in three parts in The New Yorker, became a best-seller and was hailed by The New York Times as "an event of profound historical moment"; and The Unconquerable World (Metropolitan, 2003).


Gary Younge

Alfred Knobler Fellow

Gary Younge is an Alfred Knobler Fellow at The Nation Institute and a New York correspondent for The Guardian. His first book, No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the Deep South (Picador, 1999), was published to much acclaim and was released in the United States in 2002. His second book, Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States (New Press, 2006), was released on both sides of the Atlantic. He was awarded Newspaper Journalist of the Year by the Ethnic Minority Media Awards in the UK in 2002, 2003 and 2004.


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Blackwater

The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
(paperback edition)


By Jeremy Scahill

On September 16, 2007, Blackwater Worldwide mercenaries opened fire in Baghdad's Nisour Square, killing 17 Iraqi civilians, among them women and children. In this fully revised and updated paperback, award-winning investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill reveals the explosive story of the company that has become the new face of the U.S. war machine.

Jeremy Scahill recently won the prestigious 2007 George Polk Book Award. More


Deborah Stone's Book Tour

July 7 - November 2 | Across the United States
Deborah Stone, a Nation Books author, recently published her fourth book, The Samaritan's Dilemma. Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect calls it "a brilliant and persuasive statement of the case for organized compassion—not out of sentimentality but for the viability of society and our own self regard as a decent people." Listen to her on the radio and get a copy of the book signed at a bookstore on Stone's book tour. Find the schedule here.

August 25 | 6 pm
Bruce Mau Leads Green Symposium
(Denver, Colorado)
Institute Fellow Bruce Mau will lead the Green Constitutional Congress Symposium, which will cover a wide array of green-related topics. The symposium will take place at Buell Theater in Denver; it is produced by the Rhode Island School of Design and University of Colorado-Denver. The symposium is part of the larger event, Dialog:City at the DNC. For more information, click here. MORE

September 13
2008 ELECTION: What's Really at Stake?
(Cooper Union Auditorium, 30 Cooper Square, NYC)
Come listen to Institute Fellows Naomi Klein and Jeremy Scahill (also a Nation Books author of Blackwater) speak at a benefit for The Indypendent newspaper at Cooper Union Auditorium in New York City. Additional panelists to be announced; meet the speakers at a special pre-event reception. For more information and to reserve tickets, visit indypendent.org or call (212)-221-0521. MORE


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