Heart of Darkness: Homage to Pearl Is Grown Up, Courageous

A Mighty Heart
Running Time 100 minutes
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
Written by John Orloff
Starring Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman

Human-rights violations in countries where thugs and tyrants place personal goals ahead of civil liberties seem doubly egregious when applied to the risks journalists take to tell Read More

Errol Morris Has A Very Blue Line: Curse Darkness

Who was the self-described “historical pessimist” who wrote last March-when it was still unclear whether the invasion of Iraq would proceed-”War or no war, things will get worse.”

Oh, right, that was me. (In a March 2003 issue of The Observer .) I still hope I’ll be proven wrong in the long run. I take Read More

Kidnapped in Karachi: A Real-Life Gothic Horror

A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl, by Mariane Pearl with Sarah Crichton. Scribner, 320 pages, $25.

If Mariane Pearl, widow of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, had written a really bad book, it would have been hard to criticize. After what she’s been through-six months pregnant, losing a husband Read More

In Danny Pearl Book, Lévy Says Next 9/11 Brewing in Pakistan

“I had the feeling,” Bernard-Henri Lévy says, “that the 21st century really began with the collapse of the Twin Towers and the murder of this single man, Daniel Pearl.” Both are deeply symbolic killings. What’s more, he contends, the same forces behind both crimes are now planning something far worse.

“It will make 9/11 look Read More

Danny Pearl Case Isn’t Yet Closed For Journalists

Maybe it’s time to think about Daniel Pearl again. Not merely because he represents a different aspect of journalism, let’s say, than the one that has come in for so much attention lately. Not merely because he represents the very best and bravest. But because, in certain ways, the Daniel Pearl case is not closed. Read More

Journalist Death Gets Mount Sinai Scathing Rebuke

On Jan. 13, Mike Hurewitz-a longtime reporter for the New York Post who spent the last eight

years at The Times Union of Albany -died

at Mount Sinai Hospital following surgery to donate part of his liver to

his ailing brother.

Two months later, on March 12, the New York State Department of

Health Read More

Public Ritual of Murder Designed to Inspire More

I had e-mailed the poet that the ritual aspects of the murder of Daniel Pearl–the declaration of his religion, the slit throat, the severed head, all of them videotaped–were particularly black. He asked, reasonably enough, why? Aren’t banal murderers just as wicked as dramatic ones? Aren’t their victims just as dead?

But as a poet, Read More