Jonathan Myerson Katz

I'm an independent journalist covering COVID-19, the resurgence of fascism, and the climate crisis for national publications, my Substack newsletter, and on Twitter @KatzOnEarth. By joining my Patreon community, you enabling me to keep doing what I do, without fear or favor. Thank you.

I've spent the last twenty years as a professional journalist, reporting from Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, and the Middle East, and from across the United States. My byline has appeared everywhere from front pages of the New York Times to the features section of Smithsonian Magazine. I spent eight years as a correspondent for the Associated Press.

I'm hard at work on my next book, Gangsters of Capitalism, a look at the wars that made the U.S. a global power, through the eyes of an antihero -- Gen. Smedley D. Butler -- who participated in all of them, then became a critic of them. To pull this off, my research so far has taken me to China, the Philippines, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Panama, Nicaragua, and Guantánamo Bay, as well as archives from coast to coast.

My first book, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, was a PEN Literary Award Finalist. It also won the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award for the year's best book on international affairs. It built on my years as the AP correspondent in Haiti, which included surviving the 2010 earthquake and revealing that United Nations peacekeepers were responsible for introducing a deadly post-quake cholera epidemic.