Newsweek August 14, 2015

We were finally sitting in Donald Trump’s office for our final interview at the end of a monthlong reporting odyssey. A colleague and I had tailed him pretty much everywhere he went. I flew with him down to Atlantic City in his retrofitted French military helicopter, rode with him in his limos and chatted with him in his various offices and at his home. We were reporting a cover profile for Newsweek. It was 1987, and Trump back then was a real estate and casino magnate who was, for the first time in what would become a quadrennial drill over the next 30 years, pretending to contemplate running for president. Doonesbury, the popular adult cartoon strip, had repeatedly and savagely mocked the idea, but the political class had begun to take…

It was 5:30 in the morning on my third day of silent meditation when I noticed something in me take a sharp turn left. I was groggy, frustrated by my inability to sit still and hungry for the breakfast that was still an hour off. I got up from the spot on the floor of my bedroom where I’d been attempting to meditate and walked outside, to the new-growth woods behind the residential quarters at the Vipassana Meditation Center in Shelburne, Massachusetts. It was springtime, and the outdoors seemed spring-loaded with potential: The buds on the trees were sharp little things, and hundreds of fuzzy fiddleheads dotted the forest floor, curled snug. I walked down a little looping path that stopped unsatisfyingly soon; “course boundary” signs curtailed my meandering to an area…

Updated | Less than a mile behind the rebel front line in eastern Ukraine, the abandoned warehouses of the Donetsk chemical factory sprawl across a chunk of the city’s westernmost suburb. The homes surrounding it bear the scars of the past year’s artillery bombardment. Whole apartment blocks have been burned out, and low-rise buildings are roofless and riddled with shrapnel holes. Long-suffering elderly residents potter about the devastated streets of Donetsk’s Oktyabrsky district, by now oblivious to the thunder of shellfire just a few hundred yards away. They are also unaware of a second grave danger lying deep within the grounds of that nearby chemical plant. Inside the 2-square-mile grounds of the plant, buried under 10 feet of black Ukrainian soil, lies a concrete and steel bunker, 65 feet long, 33 feet…

Toward the end of July, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan went to war. On his orders, 40 jets pounded strongholds in northern Iraq belonging to Kurdish separatists, killing at least 190 militants, according to the Turkish military. Turkish police also rounded up 1,050 terrorist suspects in raids all over the country—some of them supporters of ISIS and radical leftist groups, but over 80 percent of them suspects linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. At the same time, Kurdish militants ambushed army vehicles, shot policemen on the streets of Turkish cities and bombed police stations, killing at least 13 in the bloodiest fortnight of Turk-Kurd violence in decades. Just months after Erdogan came within a whisker of striking a grand peace deal with the Kurds, which would have ended a…

By now the lesson is clear: Burning coal and petroleum produces carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas that contributes to the warming of our globe. That alone is enough reason to believe fossil fuels are not a sustainable basis for society long-term. But here’s another reason: It took millions, even billions, of years for these fuels to accumulate, and we’re running through them at a startlingly fast pace. A study published in July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculates that we've burned nearly half of Earth’s biomass in the past 2,000 years, with 10 percent of that being consumed in the past century alone. Study author John Schramski, a researcher at the University of Georgia, likens Earth to a battery. Plants, mostly those in forests, have gradually harvested…

Just before the end of Ramadan this year, I received an unexpected call from one of Mullah Mohammed Omar’s longtime family friends. He had just learned a secret held by only a tiny circle of Omar’s most trusted associates: The supreme leader of the Afghan Taliban was dead. Rumors of Omar’s death have been circulating since he vanished in late 2001. The last verifiable sighting placed him on the back of a Honda motorbike, heading into the mountains outside Kandahar while the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance fighters closed in on the city. But this caller was different—extraordinarily well placed to know about the Mullah’s whereabouts. His claims were also very detailed. He asked not to be quoted by name on such a sensitive topic, but he and his family are highly respected…