I’ve got a new website. Visit it at:
A new book about surviving the Haiti earthquake and what really happened after. 2015 PEN Literary Award Finalist. Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan and J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards.
27 Notes
Whatever is or isn’t underground, the view from the top of Morne Bossa was spectacular. Rising majestically in the center of the picture are peaks of the Bonnet a L’Eveque. And if you look closely at the lefthand side, you’ll see the Citadelle Laferriere, the imposing 10,000-square-meter, 130-foot-high fortress built by thousands of laborers, many of them forced into treacherous service under the Haitian King Henri Christophe between 1805 and 1820. Haiti had just won its independence in a war against the French, British, and Spanish, and Christophe ordered the fortress built to defend against an invasion he feared Napoleon might order at any time to reclaim the once-valuable colony. That invasion never came. Today the fortress is best known as a tourist site and symbol of Haitian and black power and pride. I don’t know what King Henri would think of the plans for the mine here, but if Morne Bossa gets blasted for an open-pit goldmine, it will ruin the view.
Image and caption by Jonathan M. Katz.
28 Notes
The sign says “blocks for sale.” People are using them to build new homes. It’s funny. Five years ago this wasn’t a neighborhood at all—it was an open desert. I remember coming out her a few months after the quake to visit the nearby Camp Corail, the first organized relocation camp for earthquake survivors, built by the UN and U.S. military to house people relocated from the Port-au-Prince tent camp overseen by Sean Penn. I discovered soon after that the plan, at least in the minds of some influential Haitians, had been to provide a labor force for garment factories that would be built out here. At the same time, then-President Preval began encouraging people to come squat on the land, keeping the factory project from moving forward. Today that boondoggle has become Canaan, which by some metrics is now one of Haiti’s largest cities, perched precariously on hillsides with homes built from the shabby cinderblock that crumbled in the quake. That people with almost nothing managed to build a new city on raw land is a triumph of resilience and ingenuity. The conditions under which it happened are a testament to the failure of Haiti’s postquake reconstruction
Image and caption by Jonathan M. Katz.
2 Notes
In Chapel Hill, Suspect's Rage Went Beyond a Parking Dispute
I’ve been covering the Chapel Hill shootings for the New York Times. Here’s my latest, from March 3, a deep dive into the victims’ last day and the apparent killer’s motives:
A motive for the shooting may never be known. But interviews with more than a dozen of the victims’ friends and family members, lawyers, police officers and others make two central points: Before the shootings, the students took concerted steps to appease a menacing neighbor, and none were parked that day in a way that would have set off an incident involving their cars.
If those accounts do not prove what kind of malice was in Mr. Hicks’s heart, the details that emerge indicate that whatever happened almost certainly was not a simple dispute over parking.
(Photo: Travis Dove for the New York Times)
3 Notes
The U.N. Caused Haiti's Cholera Epidemic. Now the Obama Administration Is Fighting the Victims.
ICYMI, here’s my piece from last week on the Haiti cholera hearing in New York:
On Thursday, embattled victims finally got a day in court. What was most remarkable about the hearing in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan was not the lawyers’ arguments or Judge J. Paul Oetken’s pointed questions, but who was doing the arguing. The opposition to the thousands of Haitian cholera victims did not come from the U.N., which did not send a representative, but the United States government.
(via @tnr)
Writings, lately
The American Media Is in Full Panic Mode Over Ebola — And It’s Only Making Things Worse
Jean-Claude Duvalier Is Dead, But He Will Haunt Haiti for Years to Come
Duvalier inherited a country and a dictatorship, and squandered them both. (The New Republic)
UN official shows worrying signs of foot-in-mouth disease
1 Notes
C-SPAN Video: Longform Journalism in the Age of Twitter
In May, the five nominees for the 2014 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism participated in a panel discussion on the future of longform journalism at the New York Public Library.
The panelists were:
Jonathan M. Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster
Fred Kaplan, author of The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War
David Finkel, author of Thank You For Your Service
Sheri Fink, author of Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
Dan Fagin, author of Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
and host James Hoge, former editor of Foreign Affairs
(click the title or the photo below to watch)
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