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July 2012

It’s been quite a while since my last update. Parenthood will do that. But it’s been an enjoyably busy year: I wrote an article for New York magazine about the migration of violent crime in America from big cities to smaller towns and suburbs, and about an FBI agent named Jimmy Gagliano who was dispatched to the tiny community of Newburgh, NY to confront a murder epidemic. In January The New Yorker published my account of a decades-long environmental lawsuit against Chevron over environmental contamination in Ecuador. Then I spent several months delving into the business model of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel for a cover story in The New York Times Magazine.

For the last several months I’ve been working with the PBS show “Frontline” to expand some of my research on the Sinaloa cartel into a documentary, which should hopefully air sometime in early 2012.

Director Stephen Gaghan, producer Richard Brown, and the terrific novelist and screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto are working on the film version of “The Snakehead,” about which more soon.

This spring I joined The New Yorker as a staff writer, which I couldn’t be more thrilled about, so I’ll be writing a lot for the magazine and the website in the coming months. I’m also excited to be joining the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars this fall, for a year-long fellowship, during which I hope to make some progress on a new book, which is still taking shape but deals with the dynamics of corruption.