David Quigg
David Quigg is a writer and photographer. Before quitting newspaper journalism in 2003 to stay home with his newborn son and toddler daughter, David covered the World Trade Organization riots, politics, local government, and all things Seattle for The (Tacoma) News Tribune. In addition to Big Think, he now writes for The Huffington Post and his own blog, which he describes as "an undignified glimpse of the scattershot passions that, with any luck, will conspire to prevent me from ever serving as an expert panelist." He is the author of an unpublished novel, Void Where Prohibited.
Right now, just hours after someone detonated an improvised explosive device and killed four Canadian soldiers and one Canadian journalist in Afghanistan, I’m reflecting on words Canada’s defense minister spoke […]
The intellectual trap of exploring a new place — whether through actual travel or by reading a book set there — is the practically unconscious assumption that we can generalize. […]
I hope the New York Times will do a follow-up story on Friday’s “G.I.’s in Iraq Hope to Heal Sacred Walls.” The story — like an NPR broadcast in 2007 […]
The Good Soldiers is nearly unbearable. Relentlessly so. Commendably so. Whether you’re a combat veteran, a soldier’s mom, an Iraqi, the 43rd U.S. president, an ordinary American, or some pundit […]
In a recent NPR interview, National Book Award finalist Daniyal Mueenuddin spoke with arresting candor about Pakistan, using the word “feudalism” to describe the structure of life in the Indus […]
My dad read me Jack London’s The Call of the Wild when I was nine. I graduated from high school in a city that makes a big deal of its […]
“The Most Failed State,” a piece in The New Yorker’s December 14 issue, scrutinizes Somalia and offers glimpses of the mix of nose-holding and open-mindedness U.S. leaders will need in […]
Decoding the New Taliban, a book I blogged about once already, will probably find its way into more posts here because of its timeliness, depth, and variety of voices. The […]
As I’ve continued to use this blog to track the aftermath of a September massacre in west Africa, probably the most implausible claim from Guinea’s coup leader has been his […]
Just like the time Slate’s Jacob Weisberg invited me to join his Mafia family, his latest tweet made me think some wiseass had hacked his Twitter account: “If you’re looking […]
Reporting from Mexico for the December issue of the The Atlantic, author Philip Caputo writes that “drug trafficking and its attendant corruption are a malignancy that has spread into Mexico’s […]
Graham Greene’sThe Quiet American and Antonio Giustozzi’s Decoding the New Taliban — two books that I’ve started more or less simultaneously — are jostling in my brain. In the very […]
I came home from Sunday night’s thrilling Major League Soccer championship game sure that I would finish my weekend by writing about the explosive aftermath of the World Cup qualifying match between Egypt […]
The story by Evelyn Theiss of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer has been online since Friday and I can’t stop wondering how Vietnam will react to it. The headline: “My Lai […]
The new Atlantic magazine has an intriguing dispatch about how “Iranians line up daily to cross the Astara River to buy and sell jeans, chickens, bras, laptops—and often sex and […]
Maybe everyone else already knows this, but I was stunned to learn that an utterly pedestrian detail — the reliability of translation services — has hurt America’s efforts to negotiate […]
My own presumptions about Pakistan did not prepare me for the sight of this, this, this, or any of Kate Brooks’ other photos from Karachi’s “fashion week” — a glitzy […]
Knowing full well that I tee myself up for easy, Whitney-Houston-themed ridicule, I’m here to say that the children are our future, and that childhood in the Gaza Strip — […]
Because government troops in Guinea massacred civilian protesters at about the same time as I started blogging for Big Think, I’ve committed myself to using this space to track events […]
One word haunts Seymour Hersh’s new investigative piece about the potentially shaky security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal: “mutiny.” As Hersh writes, “the Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or […]
Like any mere bystander, I’m always at risk of getting etherized by the abstractions of war. So there was something compelling and arresting about hearing writer Mark Danner detail the […]
Because we aspire to put ideas above ideology here at Big Think, I want to make sure you’ve heard of Andrew Bacevich, a scholar and retired army officer who would […]
Why Vietnam Matters — a book recommended recently by George Packer of The New Yorker — gets interesting before you come across a single word written by the book’s author. […]
When I muse about the sort of Americans who might one day write in to share first-hand insights on this Global Pedestrian blog of mine, I tend to think of […]
If you think “Sony” or “Toyota” when you think of Japan, you might just be as clueless as I’ve been about “the nation’s postwar order, which relied on colossal public […]
“Obama’s War,” the smart Frontline episode about Afghanistan and Pakistan, includes a disquieting exchange between a U.S. Marine and two tribal elders in a remote Afghan village. Since this Global […]
Having blogged twice — here and here — about the September massacre by government forces in the west African nation of Guinea, I hope we’re all keeping an eye on […]
Drug-war dispatches out of Mexico, Pakistan’s seeming inability to control its tribal areas, and Jon Lee Anderson’s recent reporting on the largely lawless swaths of Rio de Janeiro lodged a […]
I can’t blog forthrightly about the remote-control assassinations detailed this week in The New Yorker without first alerting readers to my bias — a bias that’s more about pragmatism and […]
Fittingly, it was my wife who pointed me to a great little story in the Washington Post about how some women in India are refusing to get married until the […]