Posts Tagged ‘North Africa’

On Arab intellectuals during the revolution

Really, did anyone need an intellectual to tell them what the revolution was about?

Beware, dictatorship can return

Voting is the answer, says this campaign in Tunisia

Tunisia votes, Islamists win

This is good news, actually


What to make of this 19th C. Arab-Chinese-Peruvian portrait?

Long distance cultural exchange began much earlier than we sometimes imagine

A Savage War of Peace by Alistair Horne

The best book about the 9/11 attacks and war in Iraq, though it is about France in 1950s Algeria

Are American conservatives the new French?

Libya suggests that conservatives want chest-beating glory more than they want success


The Gaddafi family photo album

Gaddafi made himself a celebrity. Is that why the Times decided to publish his stolen family album?

Film of a garden party in Alexandria, Egypt c1920s

A lifestyle now lost captured on a film that cannot be watched

In Egypt, the disillusionment sets in

Egypt had half a revolution that now needs to be made whole


Gaddafi’s mercenaries reveal all

They are the ‘smart money’ in the stockmarket battlefield and started to flee two weeks ago

The Libya my family knew in the 1960s

These archival videos make Libya look more modern than it was but many who knew it then loved it

Mabrouk, ya Seif al-Islam!

Gaddafi’s son shows up in the night. Did he accidentally reveal where his father is hiding?


They are dancing in Tripoli

Suddenly, the rebels have taken the heart of Libya’s capital and Gaddafi’s end is near

Where tourists and locals go in Cairo

Genius mash-up map uses Flickr photos to reveal insiders’ favorite areas in cities around the world

Arab arts and political radicals in London this weekend

And there are cool Arab arts of all sorts in London this summer


Into the darkness of the New York Times comments section

The central challenge for a superpower: strong views, little knowledge, limitless power to intervene

Was the Egypt revolution a ‘foreseeable surprise’?

Slate says yes, but bungles the argument

‘Sheikh’: a spelling manifesto

Finally, one Middle East conflict that can be settled: it’s not pronounced like ‘chic’


Newsreel: ’67 War and party balloons for Red China

Newsreels declare: US neutral in ’67 War in the Middle East and Red China fears party balloons

Mubarak on trial: should the past be prosecuted?

Forgetting the past is unacceptable, but so too is shelving it through superficial justice

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

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

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