News

The ‘inheritance project’ and Mubarak’s last hours

The film hindi going on behind the scenes during the last days of Egypt’s First Family

The Fantastic Four of the Republican race

A robot, a kook, and two flawed moralizing Catholics is really the best that the GOP can offer us?

When Memphis cared

When Martin Luther King was killed, John T. Fisher showed that not only blacks in Memphis cared


A vial of Saharan sand from the Acacus region in Libya

The Acacus felt so remote that, now, only something as material as sand confirms I was really there

Photographer Martin Klimas and the color of sound

Marrying Abstract Expressionism to every heavy metal kid’s discovery that speakers produce air waves

Finally, propaganda I can believe in

The UK Foreign Office makes a stout defense of multiculturalism, just in time for the Olympics


Typography and world conquest

This exhibition shows the moment colonial expansion brought the Gutenberg revolution to the world

The Cincinnati Daguerreotypes of 1848

Exploring in high detail an America that was newly industrializing and soon to war with itself

Why Mubarak should not be hanged

The old man’s secrets about his odious regime are worth more to Egypt than vengeance


Expect a lot of Republican talk about the apocalypse

As Richard Nixon understood, anger and resentment are the ties that bind American conservatism

The incoherence of the Republican battle in Iowa

GOP social and economic policies are incoherent and none of the candidates knows how to hide that

The Egyptian police beat protesters senseless

The video is hard to watch but it shows why freedom in Egypt has not yet been won


Goodbye, Earthlings

Kim Jong-il departs for some distant galaxy of coiffed hairdos and Politburo-issue safari suits

Hitch 1949-2011

Christopher Hitchens wrote like a polymath on a bender and his bombast was a pure reading pleasure

The official end of the Iraq debacle

A bad idea, but it will incubate like a latent virus in right-wing circles and return one day


Paula Scher on the spirit of typeface

PBS has an evangelical video for those who still look through type without noticing it

In honor of the Delhi centennial

Running to catch the train to India’s capital

Mapping the invisible city of Beirut

How a city fed up with thinking about war knows where the next frontlines will be


Fashion collective threeASFOUR brings peace to the Middle East

Hardly: Muslim – Jewish cultural ‘togetherness’ is the easy part

Back flips off the destroyed infrastructure in Gaza

Bringing the daredevil leaps of parkour to the bombed-out buildings of the Gaza Strip

Sharia El Aziz Osman street sign, Cairo, Egypt

I used to live on this street in Zamalek and have now given it to the protagonist in my novel


What to make of the elections in Egypt?

Millions turned out, but will the electoral process prove worthy of the hopes invested in it?

Egypt votes today, but it’s a mess

The elections were badly organized, the military undermined them, but turnout has been significant

What is going on with the Arab League?

They actually did something. Sanctions on Syria won’t work, but it’s a miracle all the same