Apologists are always the same. Whether they’re rationalizing war crimes, or promoting reactionary ideologies, they always feign distance from what’s being defended. Why do they insist on appearing impartial? It never works for me. Rats always smell like rats. There’s no disguising them. I’m not the only journalist who feels this way. (More…)
English used to be synonymous with tourism. Visit any European city, and the chances were, if you saw something written in English, it was aimed at foreigners. Or, depending on where you were, American forces stationed in the area. Particularly in Germany, which boasted amongst the largest concentrations of US forces stationed abroad during the Cold War. (More…)
Pakistan has a Bhutto problem. Now reaching a third generation, its latest incarnation is the current chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party: 24-year-old Bilawal Bhutto. The young aristocrat follows a line of succession that includes his father, outgoing President Asif Ali Zardari, his mother, assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and most importantly, his grandfather, popular statesman Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. (More…)
There is no shortage of lessons to be learned from the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Americans of conscience, however they may feel about the verdict, should examine what this says about our attitudes. Those attitudes are reflected not only in how we deal with the violence on our own streets, but also around the world. (More…)
One of the peculiarities of punk is that its ethos of personal freedom has often been expressed through regimentation. Punk’s earliest exponents had no coherent ideology, yet punk exists today as a congeries of well-defined styles and symbologies. A further feature of its history, whose appearance was roughly coterminous with the emergence of punk itself, is the view that punk is dying or that it is already dead. (More…)
If only we could blame Berlusconi. In the most widely-reported incident of an Italian politician making racist remarks since Il Cavaliere called Obama “suntanned,” Roberto Calderoli, vice president of Italy’s Senate, likened Cécile Kyenge, the country’s first black cabinet minister, to an orangutan. As many newspapers have reported, it’s not the first time that a legislator from the Lega Nord has made such a remark. (More…)
In the part of the Tucson metro area where I live — the same part where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was nearly assassinated in 2011 — anti-Obama sentiment has been strong since he first became a viable Presidential candidate. I take it for granted that I’m going to hear people disparaging him on a daily basis. (More…)
Rock bands lending their ‘brand name’ to consumer products – surely the epitome of ‘selling out’? The Motorhead phone cover would seem to be the latest – and certainly not the worst – in a long tradition of branded merchandise, whose apotheosis must surely be the Kiss coffin. The critique of this kind of branding is almost as familiar as the branding itself. (More…)
As a Pakistani immigrant, I often feel alienated by American pop culture. Even though I identify with a lot of it, I also find it foreign, and occasionally, have to check out in order to recharge. This was especially the case two weeks ago, when I took a train into Manhattan in order to see a classical Persian music concert at Café Nadry.
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On Tuesday, Jews will observe Tisha B’Av. It’s a sad and solemn holiday, which mainly commemorates the destruction of the two Holy Temples, and which has subsumed many other tragic events that have befallen the Jews over the centuries. Those events continued into the 20th century, as on Tisha B’Av in 1942, the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camp, Treblinka, began. (More…)
A clip from a 2012 interview with Dustin Hoffman has gone viral. As a potential antidote to the casual and furious misogyny unleashed during Wimbledon, where women were invisible or too ugly, one can see why. In the video, Dustin Hoffman describes his experience preparing for the title role of Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982) and the revelation it yielded. (More…)
Few cultural movements have left more of a mark than DIY (Do-it-Yourself) punk. For the last four decades, the scene has had a tremendous impact on both music and radical politics. Best known for its anarchists, little attention to has been paid to its ideological contradictions. For example, even its most politicized form, anarcho-punk, proclaims anti-capitalist goals, yet economically ends up working through market mechanisms. (More…)