WASHINGTON—In an 8,000-word exposé featured in this week's issue of The New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author Seymour Hersh examines the life of 33-year-old Alex Phelan, a Virginia resident who on Dec. 3, 2011, cut him off while driving on the Capital Beltway. "A high-level municipal official who agreed to speak on background for this article confirmed Phelan was first licensed to drive by the Commonwealth of Virginia in March 1995 and since that time has received only three motor-vehicle citations despite being a piece-of-shit driver who clearly doesn't know when to yield the goddamn right-of-way," read an excerpt from the piece, for which Hersh spent six months interviewing Phelan's friends and family members, in addition to poring over internal documents obtained from various traffic enforcement agencies and a high school driver's ed program. "On Sept. 17 of last year Phelan went to I-Deal Autos in McLean, VA and purchased a 2007 Toyota Camry bearing the tag TRK-254 that was not three months later jerked into the right lane without so much as a signal when the asshole decided at the last fucking second to take the Georgetown Pike and almost fucking killed the driver behind him." Hersh's future projects include a book about the vice presidency of Dick Cheney and an in-depth series of articles on a disputed labor charge at a D.C.-area Jiffy Lube.