Journalist Rahaf Haboub grew up in Daraya, a Damascus suburb besieged by pro-government forces for more than three years. She and her family fled in fall 2012 after the government targeted the area with airstrikes and barrel bombs – these are her recollections of those harrowing times. (More…)
Seymour Hersh occupies a peculiar place in the American media landscape. As the guy who broke the story of the massacre at My Lai in 1969, and having been instrumental in exposing the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2004, Hersh is second only to Woodward and Bernstein in the firmament of investigative journalism. (More…)
One of the most persistent domestic critiques of Donald Trump is that his proposals are not truly American. From the White House to the protests at his rallies, he has been savaged for promoting the sort of extremism the United States has long ascribed to its enemies, thereby calling into question the self-righteous presumptions that undergird the nation’s foreign policy. (More…)
“So Erdogan, Aliyez, and Nazarbayez are on a boat …” It reads like the set up to a joke, but all three men – the leaders of Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan – did meet on board the Turkish presidential yacht MV Savarona last week. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used an Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit as occasion to again show off the luxurious vessel, originally presented to President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1938. (More…)
One cannot help but wonder what author Andrew Solomon would have achieved had he been born into different circumstances. He sits across from me on a French-style couch in his private library, arms extended, seemingly afloat on a swell of cushions. (More…)
I make my living trying to edit the Ladies’ Home Journal. And because the public has been most generous in its acceptance of that periodical, a share of that success has logically come to me. Hence, a number of my very good readers cherish an opinion that often I have been tempted to correct, a temptation to which I now yield. My correspondents express the conviction variously, but this extract from a letter is a fair sample: (More…)
The last day of the NBA regular season made for remarkable television. While Kobe Bryant, the first superstar to make his mark in the wake of basketball’s massive global expansion, was playing the final game of his illustrious twenty-year career in Los Angeles, the Golden State Warriors, the league’s best team and defending champions, were winning their record-breaking 73rd game. (More…)
Cheap cities have their downsides. Aside from being, quite frequently, depressed, they’re gated communities in training. For every vintage building full of broke punks, there’s a real estate developer looking to transform it into over-priced live-work condos. It just takes the malcontents to scout them out, and make them livable again. Bohemians are, as it always turns out, the shock troops of the wealthy. (More…)
Some 3,000 Colombian nationals have gone to fight and, if it comes to it, die in defense of the UAE since 2011. Of this number, at least 300 are now serving in Yemen at the Port of Aden. What distinguishes these men in Yemen from the UAE’s other “guest workers,” though, is that they will be offered citizenship, a rare privilege not often extended to other expatriate communities. (More…)
When I step out of the rain and into the restaurant, Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran is already waiting for me. Though I’m seven minutes early, I arrive to find the exiled Sri Lankan lawyer, known to his compatriots as Rudra, sitting at a corner table and peacefully watching the deluge outside. (More…)
Running a record label is a pain in the ass. It always begins with the best of intentions that reside somewhere in the mix of DIY ethics, wanting to support your friends, and simply trying to release your band’s arguably mediocre record when nobody else will do it. (More…)
Talking about politics in the United States these days can give one the feeling of being a latter day Edward R. Murrow, broadcasting from London in the days of the Battle of Britain. Certainly the differences are massive and cannot be ignored, not the least of which being that we are the ones launching explosives at other people. (More…)