One of the benefits of living in a small-ish city like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is that I frequently run across people I actually want to see, like my old friend Shaun Slifer, one of the area’s many multi-talented and underappreciated artists, as well as a longtime champion of the underdog. Enthusiastic as always, he told me about a project he had been working on called the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. (More…)
There were many issues excluded from the elections. The major issues were social and domestic policy: austerity, immigration, the NHS. Foreign policy was almost completely absent. Yet the issues were presented as if they do reside in a vacuum. The context surrounding UKIP’s rise was lost to 24 hour news. The same can be said for the SNP and the Greens. (More…)
Most schoolchildren have a cursory knowledge of Herodotus’ “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World”, even if they can’t name all of them. A forgivable oversight, as the Great Pyramid of Giza is the only one that remains, too large and intractable to go quietly into oblivion. (More…)
First Iggy Azalea. Then Rachel Dolezal. Why are all these white girls playing black? Is it just for the currency? To advance their careers? Or does it point to some uncomfortable truths, something messy, something that is not easily categorized as a “black” or “white” issue? (More…)
An American friend of mine once said, “You have to go and speak to a man who looks like the guy in The Naked Gun. I was writing an article for the local English language newspaper and was looking for a good quote on Russian-Georgian relations, which were warmer back then. (More…)
In a recently released open letter, a group of scholars and venture capitalists described the digital revolution as, “the best economic news on the planet.” This is the sort of thing likely to elicit hosannas from those whose situations in finance and academia have positioned them to reap the benefits of this revolution. (More…)
For a few years subsequent to the Second Anglo-Afghan war, our frontier policy happily remained free from complications. It will be desirable to refer shortly to the progress of Russia in Central Asia, and of her conquests of the decaying Principalities of Khiva, Bokhara and Kokand. (More…)
Today is the 130th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty’s arrival in New York Harbor. To celebrate, Google has offered up one of its “doodles”, in which a disproportionately huge rendering of the bronze lady dwarfs the ship that is bringing her to the United States. She appears to be tipping over, as if she were about to fall into the sea. It’s a strangely resonant image. (More…)
Following the Cold War, America’s military and intelligence apparatus in Germany remained in place. To this day, there are thousands of US troops stationed in the country. When Gerhard Schröder, in another attempt to win an election, made a lot of noise about not supporting the war in Iraq, he nonetheless was happy to allow the US to use German bases. (More…)
The Pakistani Islamist Abul Ala’a Maududi had polemical and highly complex views on the spiritual acceptability of democracy. Maududi’s criticisms were unmistakably protofascist, and framed the political outlook of Jamaat-e Islami, formed in British India, in 1941. (More…)
The ending of a fiction represents the point at which its essential artificiality is most acute. While individual lives do end, life itself does not end (or at least, will not end on earth for a literally unthinkably long time). When a fiction ends, it is the apotheosis of the human ability and desire to chop up the flow of time into manageably finite stories. (More…)
The construction of major highways in four provinces, as well as pressure to designate the Chinese-financed Gwadar as a duty-free port, has breathed new life into ongoing efforts for Pakistani development. (More…)