RAFFI KHATCHADOURIAN
	Articles / Bio / Links /
	Recent Work: Pages 1 | 2 | 3 NEXT
	THE NEW YORKER
	Published: 11/23/2009
	The Taste Makers
	Growing up, Michelle Hagen lived near a large factory in Cincinnati that produced what she and her sisters called The Smell. The aroma was dynamic and unpredictable, almost like a living thing. On some hot summer days, it was thick and sweet, and when it drifted over Hagen's neighborhood -- a series of row houses by the interstate -- it was as if molasses had been poured through the streets. At other times, the smell was protein-rich and savory. Many of the odors triggered specific associations -- birthday cake, popcorn, chicken noodle soup -- and they stayed with her. In 1992, Hagen went to the University of Cincinnati to study art, but she soon turned to science, majoring in biology. She never imagined that she would end up working in the factory that made The Smell. The factory belongs to a Swiss company called Givaudan, the largest manufacturer of flavors and fragrances in the world, and upon graduating Hagen got a temporary job there that soon grew into something permanent. After three years of gruelling apprenticeship, she became a flavorist, a job that admitted her into a kind of secret society. ///continue///
	THE NEW YORKER
	Published: 09/28/2009
	Nader's Blueprint
	For nearly half a decade, Ralph Nader --lawyer, consumer advocate, winner of five-tenths-and-six-hundredths of one per cent of the popular vote in 2008 -- has been secretly working on his first novel, writing drafts and making edits on multiple Underwood Standard typewriters. Nader does not feel comfortable referring to the book as a novel, even though everything in it is made up. He says that the work belongs to a new genre, one that he calls "a practical utopia," and defines as "a fictional vision that could become a new reality." The book, called "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!," is seven hundred and thirty-six pages long, and it contains dozens of characters, many of them real people -- Warren Buffett, Barry Diller, and Ted Turner, among others -- who act out Nader's political fantasies. By the last page, most of the reforms that Nader has been arguing for all these years end up being enacted. Corporations are neutered. Third parties win. America is reborn. ///continue///
	THE NEW YORKER
	Published: 07/06/2009 & 07/13/2009
	The Kill Company
	Three years ago, at a hastily built command center in the Iraqi desert, near Samarra, a U.S. Army colonel knelt over a dust-caked body bag. Inside were the remains of a man who had just been killed by soldiers in the colonel's brigade, which was engaged in a vast air-assault mission called Operation Iron Triangle. The soldiers had been hunting for militants in nearby villages and crumbling Baathist-era buildings, some of which had been constructed by Saddam Hussein to serve the Al Muthanna chemical weapons complex -- a series of dirt-covered bunkers that rise from the desert like Babylonian temples. ///continue///
	THE NEW YORKER
	Published: 10/27/2008
	The Third Man
	One afternoon in late August, Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party's candidate for President, stood in a greenroom at Stephen Colbert's television studio staring at a closed-circuit monitor. Barr, who was about to appear on "The Colbert Report," was wearing a dark Brooks Brothers suit and an orange tie. As he watched, the monitor displayed Colbert's opening segment a routine involving footage from Burning Man, the annual culture festival in the Nevada desert known for copious amounts of body paint and psychedelic drugs. Colbert pretended that the footage was from the Democratic National Convention. ///continue///
	THE NEW YORKER
	Published: 10/08/2008
	The Stolen Forests
	The town of Suifenhe, a former Russian imperial outpost on the Trans-Siberian Railway, has belonged to China since the nineteen-forties, and occupies a broad valley in northern Manchuria. From a distance, its homes and factories appear to cling to a rail yard, with tracks fanning out into a vast latticework of iron as they emerge from the Russian border. Suifenhe is a place of singular purpose. Nearly every train from Russia brings in just one commodity: wood -- oak, ash, linden, and other high-value species. There is also poplar, aspen, and larch, and occasionally great trunks of Korean pine, a species that was logged by the Soviets until there was almost none left to cut down. ///continue///
	THE NEW YORKER
	Published: 08/15/2008
	Dem Delegates
	The Republican Party in New York City is not unlike a species of tropical bird, in that it has evolved in unusual ways, will most likely never be dominant, and has always held a tenuous status in the political ecology of the five boroughs. During the Republican Convention, last week, New York City Republicans were certainly exotic. Overheard in the lobby of the hotel where they stayed: "Republicans from New York are pinko Commies anywhere else." ///continue///
	THE NEW YORKER
	Published: 11/05/2007
	Neptune's Navy
	One afternoon last winter, two ships lined up side by side in a field of pack ice at the mouth of the Ross Sea, off the coast of Antarctica. They belonged to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a vigilante organization founded by Paul Watson, thirty years ago, to protect the world's marine life from the destructive habits and the voracious appetites of humankind. Watson and a crew of fifty-two volunteers had sailed the ships, the Farley Mowat, from Australia, and the Robert Hunter, from Scotland, to the Ross Sea with the intention of saving whales in one of their principal habitats. ///continue///
	THE NEW YORKER
	Published: 04/02/2007
	Bus Ride
	At 5:30 A.M. one recent Saturday, twenty or so people stood huddled in the northeast corner of Union Square. They were waiting for buses that would take them to Washington, D.C., for a protest at the Pentagon, timed to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and, more or less, with the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 March on the Pentagon. Among those gathered were members of the pro-impeachment organization World Can't Wait (which had chartered two buses), some Revolutionary Communists, and a contingent from Students for a Democratic Society, this final group being remarkable because, until last year, it had been dormant for nearly four decades. ///continue///
	THE NEW YORKER
	Published: 01/22/2007
	Azzam the American
	Adam Gadahn, the first American to be charged with treason in more than fifty years, was born in Oregon, grew up in rural California, and converted to Islam at the age of seventeen. He is now twenty-eight. No one who knew him before his religious awakening ever thought that he would join Al Qaeda, and many people who knew him after he did are still perplexed. And yet, in a short time, Gadahn has become one of Osama bin Laden's senior operatives. (He is believed to be hiding in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan.) He is a member of Al Qaeda's media committee, and his responsibilities are thought to include those of translator, video producer, and cultural interpreter. Primarily, though, Gadahn is a spokesperson, a role he performs with tremendous conviction. ///continue///
	THE NATION
	Published: 05/15/2006
	Behind Enemy Lines
	In the days following Adolf Hitler's suicide in 1945, amid the rubble of Allied aerial bombardment, the Red Army's westward advance and Nazi surrender, a company of American infantrymen made their way up Munich's Prinzregentenstrasse, toward the late Fuhrer's personal residence. Hitler had owned a second-floor luxury apartment in Munich. The soldiers' mission was to commandeer important Reich documents that might be stored there and to locate Hitler's will. In the apartment, they found a sculpture and a painting of Hitler's niece and love interest, Geli Raubal. (Hitler was rumored to have murdered her in the bedroom.) They found costly furnishings, spacious rooms and state-of-the-art gadgetry. They did not find important Reich documents, nor did they find a will. Several floors below there was a bomb shelter. There was also a safe, which an Army mechanic managed to force open. ///continue///
	THE NEW YORK TIMES
	Published: 04/28/2006
	Blowback in Africa
	Ever since Chad gained independence 46 years ago, it has been a world-class model of political dysfunction. In the 1970s, Chad's president, Francois Tombalbaye, compelled civil servants to renounce Western customs, undergo a tribal initiation rite known as yondo and profess belief in a nationalist creed he called Chaditude. He was executed in 1975... ///continue///
	THE VILLAGE VOICE
	Published: 01/31/2006
	Hunting the Bin Laden of the Sahara
	In the early months of 2004, a lone convoy of Toyota pickup trucks and SUVs raced eastward across the southern extremities of the Sahara. The convoy, led by a wanted Islamic militant named Ammari Saifi, had just slipped from Mali into northern Niger, where the desert rolls out into an immense, flat pan of gravelly sand... ///continue///
	Pages 1 | 2 | 3 NEXT