News

Remembering Studs Terkel

It would have been the great oral historian’s 99th birthday today

John McCain demolishes the Bush-era torture apologists

Torture didn’t get us Osama bin Laden, but it cost us dearly

Sahrawi refugees photographed by Andrew McConnell

Incredible, luminous figures stand out against landscapes of perpetual night


An evocative group portrait at a cafe in Egypt, 1934

A moment captured during an outing to Roda island in the 1930s

A Guatemalan’s final video before his murder

Everything in this video is untrue, except a fundamental truth about violence in Guatemalan politics

Watching Dante in 3-D in a cathedral, and other New York transgressions

For a night, the New Museum turns all of Nolita into a video art space


How the Osama bin Laden news spread on Twitter

It began with a single tweet, not the first with the news but the most trusted

My grandfather’s sketch of the home he’d found in Cairo in 1956

Part of an effort to entice his family to join him in Egypt in the aftermath of the 1956 war

Talking with Lila Azam Zanganeh about Nabokov and happiness

Finding a kindred spirit on the rich cultural heritage lost to exile


New York’s next taxi: suburbia comes to the city

Can a bunch of bureaucrats turn even this ugly vehicle into a legend?

Osama bin Laden killed after 3,519 days of freedom

Osama bin Laden is dead but it is the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions that are killing Al Qaeda

Visiting the oyster heaven just north of San Francisco

Oysters may be an acquired taste but Tomales Bay is definitely the best place to acquire it


Osama bin Laden still free 3,514 days later

What is most astonishing is that there is no public pressure whatsoever to capture him

Another dinosaur nears the end, this time in Yemen

Yemen is a hard place to govern but Ali Abdullah Saleh has done a poor job of it all the same

Malcolm Gladwell’s inexplicable indulgence of an anti-Semite

Was the L’Oréal founder and Nazi collaborator merely a pragmatist, as Gladwell contends?


The Mitzvah Tanks cruise Manhattan for Passover

A mitzvah on the spot for people on the go, it promises

The great China infrastructure build-out is almost over

China’s building boom has been going on for 20 years; a recent visit to Fujian shows that’s ending.

Reading the Times on the architectural symbolism of Cairo

Much right and a few key things wrong about Tahrir Square in Cairo, the center of the revolution


The strange structures off Italy’s Adriatic coast

Italy’s trabocchi fishing platforms are of mythical origin. Are they related to ones in India?

Little Red Book by Mao Tse-tung, second edition, 1967

The rare second edition of Mao’s famous book, with a foreword by Lin Biao before he fell from grace

The truth about the Egyptian military

In the revolution, Egyptian reverence for the military shamed them into not opening fire. Now what happens?


Chemistry notebook, People’s Republic of China, 1976

A 1976 notebook found in Xiamen begins with Maoist political slogans and ends with chemistry notes

At LCD Soundsystem’s last-ever show

The band put on a marathon final show at Madison Square Garden and went out in style

Rare color images of the Great Depression

The Depression in color is caught between deprivation and an idealized small-town American life