Posts Tagged ‘politics’

The fall of men at the NYRB

Surely #MeToo should also be about educating men in their 60s like Ian Buruma rather than driving them out

The Battle of Chile and the wonder of movie theaters

The Battle of Chile is a great film that was made more powerful by the sound of anguish in the audience

Banning the Indian rupee notes really was dumb

The cash ban was floated in a Tamil action film, of all places, yet somehow became real policy


Ta-Nehisi Coates is wrong about Trump voters

True, for many race defined this campaign but stating that bluntly won’t win them back

Police shootings database

Whatever the cause the sheer number of dead should impress us: 813 so far this year with weeks to go

Robert Silvers was our greatest editor

Robert Silvers died this week but his New York Review of Books brought me years of pleasure


Tracking the incompetent Trump cabinet

Bush’s team bungled Hurricane Katrina but they were professionals compared to Trump’s gang

Warrior-gymnasts in Tonkin, Vietnam, 1909

French overlords in colonial-era Vietnam make the locals do ridiculous things

The generosity of the Quebec City eulogy

After the massacre at a Quebec City mosque, a lesson in how to defeat hate


Homs, Syria after five years of war

Drone video footage shows there’s no life left in Syria’s third largest city

Charles de Gaulle campaign poster

After the attacks by Islamic State in Paris the old slogan “With You, For You” is fitting

Bashar al-Assad stonewalls Charlie Rose

Charlie Rose gets in a theater of the absurd debate with Assad and loses


The amazing marginalia of In Search of Fatima

A reader hostile to everything lets her feelings be known

The New York Times shuts down India Ink

The Times gives up being local everywhere, returns to the parochial interests of a US audience

Where the non-Christian Americans are

Christians abound but that does not make the US a Christian country


Narendra Modi mask at a BJP rally

Why Narendra Modi is a bad choice for India

India is too internally diverse to privilege any single group within society, but Modi will try

#Rwanda20yrs

An archive documenting the Rwandan genocide 20 years on, along with much else

Sisi builds his regime

Joshua Stacher explains the violence and repression in Egypt


98.1% of Egyptians vote for the Sisi constitution

By comparison, Mubarak only claimed 88.6% of Egyptians voted for him in his last election in 2005

Two constitutions, one triumph

Tunisia got it right with their new constitution while Egypt reverted to old authoritarian habits

Dead, but right, in Beirut

Hezbollah can’t kill everyone in Lebanon who believes it should give up its weapons


Interview with History by Oriana Fallaci, 1976

Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci lost the plot at the end but she was a wonder in her prime

Why hatred is easier than reason

Passion — even when wrong — stirs more than reason, which is why prejudice is so powerful

Prayer of Fear by Mosireen

The media collective Mosireen perfectly captures the current moment in Egypt