Jonathan Myerson Katz

Jonathan Myerson Katz (2017) is a journalist and author who has covered disaster, conflict, politics, and a wide range of international and domestic affairs. He is best known for his work in Haiti, where as an Associated Press correspondent in 2010 his reporting revealed how United Nations peacekeepers had caused—and were covering up their role in—a cholera epidemic that has since killed at least 10,000 people. In 2016, he secured the U.N.’s first-ever admission that it had played a role in the outbreak. Weeks later, the U.N. announced plans to pay at least $200 million to the victims’ families.

Jonathan’s first book, “The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster,” combined investigative reporting with his personal account of surviving the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Critics hailed it as the definitive account of the failed global response to the catastrophe. The book was shortlisted for the biennial 2014 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and won the 2013 Overseas Press Club of America Cornelius Ryan Award for the year’s best book on international affairs.

Jonathan has continued to work as a freelance journalist, writing for dozens of publications including The New York Times Magazine, New Republic, Foreign Policy, Politico Magazine, and The New Yorker, with grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. He is now a regular contributor to The New York Times.

As a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow at the Carey Institute, Jonathan will work on “Gangsters of Capitalism: On the Trail of the Marines Who Made an American Empire,” a new book that looks back to the first great age of America’s overseas expansionism in the early twentieth century. At its center will be a lost antihero of the era, Smedley Darlington Butler, a U.S. Marine who took part in every major American conflict from the Spanish American War until the eve of Pearl Harbor. In his sunset years, Butler became an anti-war activist, speaking out against the business interests he believed he and his fellow marines had served. The book, for St. Martin’s Press, informs today’s most pressing issues by weaving the arc of Butler’s life with international reporting from the present, and analyzing the legacy of modern wars and the world they’ve helped create.