Killer Apps: A photoillustration by Wind-Up Digital with icon art by Amy Martin turns an iPhone into the ultimate tool of war for the March/April cover package, "Killer Apps: An FP Special Report on the Future of War." Inside the magazine, P.W. Singer's "Meet the SIMS ... And Shoot Them" provided a sobering look at the U.S. military's use of video games as recruitment and training tools. "All told, the U.S. military is spending roughly $6 billion each year on its virtual side," Singer wrote, "embracing the view, as author Tom Chatfield put it, that 'games are the 21st century's most serious business.'" The issue was nominated for a National Magazine Award for best cover of the year in the News/Business category.
Toy Soldiers: Aaron Goodman Studios' playful photoillustration accompanied "The New Rules of War," a feature article by John Arquilla that explained how war needs to get smaller and smarter for a new era. "U.S. troops are exhausted by repeated lengthy deployments against foes who, if they were lined up, would hardly fill a single division of Marines," Arquilla writes. "In a very real sense, the United States has come close to punching itself out since 9/11."
Mikhail Khodorkovsky: Piotr Lesniak's gloomy, atmospheric portrait of the Russian oligarch turned political prisoner accompanied Susan Glasser and Peter Baker's profile, "The Billionaire Dissident," in the May/June issue. "No doubt," as Mikhail Khodorkovsky wrote in a letter to the authors penned from prison, "in modern Russia any person who is not a politician but acts against the government's policies and for ordinary, universally recognized human rights is a dissident."
Maostalgia: Tomas van Houtryve's photographs from the throwback Chinese city of Nanjie provide a glimpse at today's unexpected boom in "red tourism" in China. Nanjie, a collectivized town left behind by the economic reforms and evolving cultural norms of modern-day rising China, sees about 300,000 tourists annually, most of them Chinese. This image from the photo essay, "Maostalgia," shows a hotel adorned in Mao iconography and selling kitschy trinkets.
Bad Guys: A photo composite by Wind-Up Digital lines up the planet's baddest bad guys for the July/August cover, "The Committee to Destroy the World" -- a gentle send-up of Time magazine's 1999 "The Committee to Save the World" cover.
Bubble Bath: Rub-a-dub-dub, two Fed chiefs in a tub -- Stephen Kroninger's cheeky illustration of Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan deep in the bubbles ran alongside Chrystia Freeland's July/August article, "Bubble Bath," which attacked the notion that the financial crisis was caused by individual greed, not system failure. Here, Greenspan holds up Michael Lewis's The Big Short for strategic cover.
Fire in the Hole: Jason Miklian's photograph of a woman working at a mine in Jharkhand state, her bright orange dress in bold contrast to the cloud of grit rising around her, introduced an article co-authored by Miklian and Scott Carney on India's raging resource wars, "Fire in the Hole." "India is now one of the most economically stratified societies on the planet; its judicial system remains byzantine, its political institutions corrupt, its public education and health-care infrastructure anemic," the authors write. "The percentage of people going hungry in India hasn't budged in 20 years, according to this year's U.N. Millennium Development Goals report."
Global Thinkers: Artist Sean McCabe's photo collage adorned the cover of 's "100 Top Global Thinkers of 2010" special issue. This year's highest accolades went to billionaire philanthropists Warren Buffett and Bill Gates for "stepping up as the world's states falter."
The Foreign Ministers: Edel Rodriguez's illustrations of Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu ran alongside their biographies in the "100 Top Global Thinkers of 2010" special issue. In an interview with Foreign Policy editor-in-chief Susan Glasser, Amorim explained, "Brazil has this unique characteristic which is very useful in international negotiations: to be able to put itself in someone else's shoes."
Stem-Cell Tourism: Michael Crampton put a twist on cheesy old vacation promotional posters for one of the 10 "Stories You Missed in 2010" on travelers seeking out bargain-basement doctors all around the world -- and running into some unforeseen risks. As Joshua E. Keating wrote, "In June, Costa Rica, a popular destination for Americans seeking cheap medical treatments of all kinds, shut down an unauthorized stem-cell clinic operated by a U.S. entrepreneur that had attracted about 400 foreign patients since 2006, according to Reuters."
