Jonathan Myerson Katz is a journalist and author who has reported on politics, conflict, human migration, and disasters around the world. His work has appeared in the New York Times and New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Foreign Policy, New Republic, New Yorker, Washington Post, Guardian, and elsewhere.

For eight years, Katz was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, covering stories from the Second Intifada in Israel/Palestine to Mexico’s drug wars. As AP bureau chief in Haiti, in 2010, he survived and provided the first international alert of the deadliest earthquake recorded in the Western Hemisphere. Soon after he produced the first evidence showing United Nations peacekeepers had caused and were covering up their role in a devastating post-quake cholera epidemic. In 2016, Katz obtained an admission from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that the U.N. had played a role in the outbreak.

For his work in Haiti, Katz received the 2011 James Foley/Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism.

In 2012, Katz left AP to write his first book, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. The book was a PEN Literary Award finalist, and won the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Award for the year’s best book on international affairs, the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, and the WOLA/Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.

From 2016 through 2021, Katz traveled across nine countries in Latin America and Asia and did extensive archival research to uncover the forgotten history of the rise of the U.S. global empire in the early 20th Century and its legacies today. Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, was released in January 2022 to rave reviews. It made the American Booksellers Association list of national bestsellers, was shortlisted for the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Award, and won the 2023 People’s Choice Nonfiction Award from the Library of Virginia.

Katz was a 2019 New America national fellow in the Future of War program and received a fellowship from the Logan Nonfiction Program. He is on TikTok, BlueSky, Threads, and Instagram at @KatzOnEarth.

Photo and cover photo/Patrick Witty

Photo and cover photo/Patrick Witty