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William Langewiesche, the ‘Steve McQueen of Journalism,’ Dies at 70
William Langewiesche, a magazine writer and author who forged complex narratives with precision-tooled prose that shed fresh light on national security, the occupation of Iraq and, especially, aviation disasters — he was a professional pilot — died on Sunday in East Lyme, Conn. He was 70.
Cullen Murphy, his longtime editor at The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, confirmed the death, at the home of a friend, saying the cause was prostate cancer.
Mr. Langewiesche (pronounced long-gah-vee-shuh) was one of the most prominent long-form nonfiction writers of recent decades. He was an international correspondent for Vanity Fair, a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine and a national correspondent for The Atlantic.
For 10 years running, from 1999 to 2008, his pieces were finalists for the National Magazine Award, and he won it twice: in 2007 for “Rules of Engagement,” about the killing of 24 unarmed civilians by U.S. Marines in 2005 in Haditha, Iraq; and in 2002 for “The Crash of EgyptAir 990,” about a flight that went down in the Atlantic Ocean in 1999 with the loss of all 217 people aboard.
He chose to write often about calamitous events, piecing together a meticulous explanation for what went wrong while portraying the human subjects under his microscope with sympathy.
“At his best there’s a sort of cinematic omniscience in the way he writes,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview. “And so you feel almost as he feels, with your face pressed up against the window watching something unfold, often very rapidly, and often wishing that things would unfold very differently but knowing there’s nothing that can be done.”
Mr. Langewiesche’s account of the EgyptAir crash in 1999, which was profoundly enriched by his own aviation background, blamed a suicidal co-pilot. Egyptian officials refused to accept that conclusion, a response, he wrote, that was rooted in political and cultural chauvinism.
Mr. Langewiesche learned to fly as a boy and worked as a commercial pilot early on to support his literary ambition. He drew on his aviation expertise in a number of articles and books that laid out highly technical subjects in lucid prose.
Writing about Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III’s famous landing of a commercial airliner in the Hudson River in 2009, Mr. Langewiesche made the case that that injury-free belly flop was a testament more to modern airplane technology than to the heroism of the pilot.
Captain Sullenberger took issue with that account, telling The New York Times that Mr. Langewiesche’s book about the episode, “Fly by Wire,” contained “misstatements of fact.”
Reviewing “Fly by Wire” in The Times, the book critic Dwight Garner wrote, “Written quickly, it lacks some of the eloquence and steely control of Mr. Langewiesche’s earlier books.” Mr. Garner called Mr. Langewiesche “the Steve McQueen of American journalism,” referring to the author’s muscular prose style and often gripping subject matter.
In other projects — pursued thanks to editors who allowed him months for reporting and writing — Mr. Langewiesche wrote an account in The Atlantic in 2006 about how terrorists might obtain a nuclear bomb; another article, also in The Atlantic, in 2004, dissected the sinking of a ferry in the Baltic Sea a decade earlier.
His 2002 book, “American Ground: Unbuilding The World Trade Center,” based on a three-part series in The Atlantic, was reported over six months at ground zero as he meticulously covered the cleanup after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Not all of his work described life and death dramas. His profile of Robert M. Parker Jr. in The Atlantic, “The Million-Dollar Nose,” opened with the enticing line: “The most influential critic in the world today happens to be a critic of wine.”
Closer to form, he wrote about another aviation mystery: the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines flight with 277 passengers over the Indian Ocean in 2014, an article that generated enormous readership for The Atlantic.
The plane remained aloft for hours after someone in the cockpit shut down its communication signals, then plunged into the Indian Ocean.
Mr. Langewiesche hypothesized a scenario in which a pilot intent on murder-suicide had asphyxiated his passengers by climbing to 40,000 feet while depressurizing the cabin, then cruised onward until the fuel ran out and the plane plummeted.
“The scene would have been dimly lit by the emergency lights,” Mr. Langewiesche wrote, imagining those hours in chilling detail, “with the dead belted into their seats, their faces nestled in the worthless oxygen masks dangling on tubes from the ceiling.”
Of the captain, the last living soul in the plane, he wrote, “The cockpit is the deepest, most protective, most private sort of home.”
William Archibald Langewiesche was born on June 12, 1955, in Sharon, Conn. His mother, Priscila (Coleman) Langewiesche, was a computer analyst. His father, Wolfgang Langewiesche, a German-born émigré, was a test pilot for the maker of the Corsair fighter used by the U.S. Navy; he wrote a classic book on flying, “Stick and Rudder,” in the 1940s.
William, a late child, had an adult sister and brothers when he was growing up. His father taught him to fly before the boy could see over the instrument panel. Later, as an undergraduate at Stanford University, Mr. Langewiesche helped pay his way through college by piloting air taxis and charters.
After earning a degree in anthropology, he moved to New York City and worked for Flying magazine. But he quit the job because he aspired to write literary nonfiction, in part inspired by The New Yorker writer John McPhee. While struggling to be published, Mr. Langewiesche supported himself as a corporate pilot.
“Other people trying to break into writing have to work as waiters,” he told Aviation News in 2001, “and I considered myself as having a technical skill — like a welder — that I could use to support myself.”
His breakthrough came in 1991, when The Atlantic published as its November cover story his article “The World in Its Extreme,’’ a 17,000-word travelogue and natural history of the Sahara Desert. He went on to write for the magazine as a national correspondent for 15 years. In 2006, he became an international correspondent for Vanity Fair, where he contributed two to four lengthy articles a year through 2019.
Mr. Langewiesche married Anne-Marie Girard in 1977, and they had two children. The marriage ended in divorce in 2017, and the following year, he married Tia Cibani, who survives him.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son Matthew and his daughter Anna Langewiesche, both from his first marriage; his son Archibald and his daughter Castine Langewiesche, from his second marriage; and his sister, Lena Langewiesche. He lived in North Salem, N.Y., in Westchester County.
In a 2007 interview with Mediabistro, an online career site for designers and writers, Mr. Langewiesche described his method. Instead of reading exhaustively about a subject and writing questions for interviews in advance, he preferred to plunge right into a subject “with very little preparation, intentionally somewhat naïve about it.”
“I just talk to people and listen carefully and respond to what they’re saying and try to give of myself as much as I’m asking them to give of themselves, so that a true conversation can develop,” he said. “These conversations typically will go on for weeks, on and off. Sometimes I take notes.”
The real work, he said, came later when he sat down to write.
“Writing is thinking; writing is a form of thought,” he said. “It’s difficult for me to believe that real thought is possible without writing.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Steven Spielberg’s latest sci-fi thriller, “Disclosure Day,” topped the box office this weekend, an encouraging sign for what could be a big summer for theaters.
The film, which stars Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor, brought in $44 million in the U.S. and Canada for a worldwide total of $92.9 million, according to studio estimates. The opening weekend totals beat box office analysts’ expectations of about $40 million to $50 million.
“Disclosure Day” is Spielberg’s latest alien-centric movie that charts a desperate race to show the world the truth about extraterrestrials.
The film, which had a production budget of about $115 million, was also scored by legendary composer and longtime Spielberg collaborator John Williams, who is now 94 years old.
Spielberg described the film in April as “way closer to truth than fiction” during a speech at the CinemaCon trade convention in Las Vegas. The veteran director of 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and 2005’s “War of the Worlds” said at the time that he’s been curious about “what’s going on in the night” since he was a child and “been very fixated on the possibilities.”
Focus Features’ “Obsession” came in second at the box office with a domestic haul of $19 million, a continuation of the film’s strong run in theaters.
“Scary Movie,” “Backrooms” and “Masters of the Universe” rounded out the top five at the box office.
Recent box office performance — particularly with Gen Z hits “Obsession” and A24’s “Backrooms” — along with a slate of upcoming blockbuster franchise installments has buoyed the hopes of exhibitors and studio executives for a strong summer.
Next week, Walt Disney Co. and Pixar will release “Toy Story 5,” while Warner Bros.’ DC Studios has “Supergirl” landing in late June.
Universal Pictures and Illumination’s “Minions & Monsters,” Disney’s live-action “Moana,” Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” and Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” are all slated for July.
That steady cadence of new and different films is key for a healthy box office and a successful summer, said Daniel Loria, editorial director at the Box Office Co.
“We’re seeing that momentum come back on a weekend-by-weekend basis,” he said. “What we needed to get back to a healthy industry post-pandemic is consistency, and that’s the difference here in 2026.”
As inflation rates rise to their highest in years, Californians are again getting hit the hardest at the gas pumps, with a regular tank costing upwards of $100 at some stations in Los Angeles.
Inflation figures released this week show consumer and producer price rises at more than three-year highs, driven by the energy crisis stemming from the war with Iran.
Gasoline prices took the biggest bite out of consumer spending power, with prices up 41% in May from a year earlier.
While the national average for gasoline prices is a little above $4 per gallon, in California, it is near $6 per gallon. In a small number of gas stations in Los Angeles, it is even tipping toward $7.
When asked about inflation in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Trump told reporters the numbers looked great.
“I love inflation,” Trump said. “The numbers are going to be phenomenal because what’s showing is that despite the fact that we’re in a war, the numbers are much lower than anticipated, and when we’re out of that war, the numbers will be at lower numbers than they were even before it started.”
Consumers aren’t feeling the love.
Workers in front of a crude oil storage container at Sable Offshore Corp.’s Santa Ynez Unit in Santa Barbara on Friday, June 5, 2026. California producer Sable Offshore Corp. expects to restart a platform capable of pumping 10,000 barrels of oil a day some time in the third quarter this year, the company said in an investor presentation Monday.
(Caroline Brehman / Bloomberg)
The Costco gas pumps in Inglewood were busy Thursday morning, with a constant flow of cars looking to save money on its relatively low per-gallon price of about $5.50.
Inglewood resident Eddin, who chose to not give his last name, said even though his Honda Civic isn’t a big gas guzzler, he has switched to using his girlfriend’s hybrid for longer trips.
“We just take her car now just because it’s more cost-effective,” he said as he filled his tank. “I wish there was more the government could be doing for not just gas prices, but for prices in general. It seems like prices have gone up for everything.”
The unforgiving prices at the pump are set to make everyone’s summer more expensive. After gas, the largest price rise for consumers was in airline tickets, which jumped 27%.
Even staying home doesn’t shelter shoppers — the beef they might want to put on their backyard barbecues is up 15%.
Virginia resident Mario, who also opted to not give his last name, got hit twice with the inflation tax as he left Los Angeles this week. He was paying more to refill his rental as he headed for a flight home, after having paid much more for the ticket than earlier in the year.
“All of the flights are way more expensive than they used to be,” he said as he paid almost $5.80 per gallon at the 76 on Century Boulevard near Los Angeles International Airport.
The average price for a gallon of gas is around $3.90 in Virginia.
While the surge in prices is happening around the world, gas costs more in California than almost anywhere else because of higher taxes, fees and cleaner-fuel requirements.
The state’s gas supply is also particularly vulnerable because it has lost much of its drilling and refining capacity in recent years, making it more dependent on fuel from other states and countries.
As gas prices continue to climb in L.A., locals are forced to adjust their lives to the price at the pump. For some, that includes cutting back on other necessities such as food, budgeting strictly to afford half a tank of gas a week and rethinking side hustles such as food delivery service.
Public transit has become a more favorable option for some — weekday commutes on the Metro increased by nearly 8% from January to May.
Recent reports have shown a decline in spending on expensive household goods, and credit card data show that both luxury and discount shoppers spent less than usual recently on lodging, groceries, clothes and theaters to accommodate a larger gas budget.
Another Inglewood native who opted to not give her last name, Liz, is putting off filling up her gas entirely because it is so expensive. Instead, she makes more frequent visits, putting a little gas in her car at a time.
“I have to budget and do half a tank now, and half a tank later, or ask for an advance on my paycheck just to get gas,” she said.
Most people at the pumps agreed: Something needs to change.
Wayne Faulkner is from Los Angeles but now lives in Indiana, where gas is about $3.50 per gallon. He complained as he filled up his rental at the LAX stand.
“Our gas situation is much better than here,” he said.
Anthropic PBC has disabled access to its most advanced artificial intelligence models, including Mythos, following an unprecedented order by the Trump administration to keep the technology out of the hands of all foreign nationals.
The U.S. government told Anthropic to suspend access to the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models by any foreign national “whether inside or outside the United States,” citing national security concerns, the company said in a statement.
A U.S. official confirmed that the Commerce Department sent the letter. The model developer has since shut off access to both systems to all customers to ensure compliance.
Never before has the U.S. government taken such sweeping measures to rein in foreign access to frontier AI models developed by an American company. The Trump and Biden administrations have limited access abroad to other consequential technologies such as semiconductors and supercomputers, and some have debated the merits of blocking access to AI models. But restrictions on the software itself have raised constitutional and commercial concerns.
Anthropic said it believes the U.S. government issued the order after discovering that it’s possible to “jailbreak,” or bypass the guardrails, of Fable 5, a recently released version of Mythos that the company blocked from carrying out cybersecurity tasks.
“We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people,” Anthropic said in its website post. “If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”
Researchers at Amazon.com Inc. had conducted jailbreak research that revealed some vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s model, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Amazon and the U.S. government were in contact about the vulnerability before the controls were imposed, according to people familiar with matter who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy was involved in those exchanges, one of the people said. The Information reported earlier that Jassy raised concerns to senior U.S. officials.
An Amazon spokesperson said it’s not uncommon for governments to consult with the company on security risks, but declined to share details of any such discussions.
The government’s move to so widely restrict access to a set of AI models in the name of national security threatens to set a precedent for all major AI model developers including OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc. Industry leaders such as Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have in the past encouraged the US government to instead promote worldwide adoption of American AI systems and protect the nation’s lead.
“For anyone who was naive and perhaps hoping that this leverage wouldn’t be exerted, it’s a massive wake-up call,” Aidan Gomez, the co-founder of Cohere Inc., a Nvidia Corp.-backed AI startup, said Saturday in an interview. “No one can deny it any more.”
Anthropic said it received the government order at 5:21 p.m. New York time on Friday. The end-of-day directive runs counter to earlier statements, as well as an executive order recently signed by President Trump, which suggested the administration wouldn’t pursue a licensing regime for model reviews.
Friday’s directive also threatens to escalate long-standing tensions between Anthropic and some within the Trump administration. Earlier this year, the AI developer clashed with the Pentagon over the use of its technology for military and surveillance purposes. The administration declared the company a U.S. supply-chain risk as a result of the blowup and ordered U.S. agencies to phase out the use of its products.
Privately held Anthropic, which has long positioned itself as a more responsible AI developer, first released its Mythos model in April to a very limited group of companies and institutions, warning that its ability to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities made it too risky to distribute more widely.
There were signs that the limited release was working to ease tensions between Anthropic and the Trump administration: In April, the U.S. government was preparing to make a version of Mythos available to major federal agencies, Bloomberg previously reported.
Mythos also accelerated the Trump administration’s efforts on AI policy, which included the recent executive order that called for voluntary model review. That order explicitly said that nothing in it should be construed as creating a mandatory licensing regime.
David Sacks, Trump’s former AI czar and current co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, said that Anthropic refused to fix a jailbreak of the guardails in its Fable model.
“The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release,” he wrote in a post on X. “The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.”
The latest government restriction is colliding with a race among U.S. developers to deliver the most advanced AI models and prove to their investors that the technology can turn a profit. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are seeking initial public offerings as soon as this year, following SpaceX’s own historic IPO.
The rush to deliver the most cutting-edge AI models spurred Anthropic itself to post a lengthy blog earlier this month, calling for the creation of a system in which governments and AI developers collectively decide when to slow work on the technology to stave off the risks it may pose.
“It would be good for the world to have the option to show or temporarily pause” AI work that may be dangerous, the company said in the post at the time. AI is advancing to the point where the technology can make human work thousands of times more efficient or even replace it, creating a new set of risks, the company said.
The European Union’s executive arm said that it’s assessing Anthropic’s statement and is continuing to talk to allies about the potential risks and cybersecurity concerns related to powerful new AI models. The European Commission added that the latest developments underline Europe’s need for technological sovereignty.
‘“s a person in the field, I’m not particularly thrilled to see this,” said Cohere’s Gomez. “I don’t think this is partnerly, I don’t think this is the right thing to do for the broader technological alliances that have developed over the course of the past 80 years.”
Eastland and Lowenkron write for Bloomberg. With assistance from Shirin Ghaffary, Yi Wei Wong, Gian Volpicelli, Spencer Soper and Thomas Seal.
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