• Unlocking Literary Horizons: Navigating the Craft of Writing Books and Essays

    Unveiling the Art of Writing

    Embarking on the journey of literary creation is akin to navigating uncharted waters. The art of writing is a multifaceted tapestry, weaving together threads of creativity, passion, and discipline. Whether crafting a compelling book or a thought-provoking essay, the process involves a delicate dance between inspiration and perspiration.

    Crafting Worlds with Words

    In the realm of book authorship, writers become architects of imaginary realms. Each chapter unfolds like a carefully constructed building, and characters breathe life into the narrative. However, the process demands more than mere storytelling; it requires the mastery of language, the ability to convey emotions, and the skill to transport readers to alternate realities.

    Similarly, the world of essay writing is an intellectual battlefield where ideas clash and synthesize. Essays are the vessels of thought, offering readers a guided tour through the author’s mind. Whether dissecting complex concepts or advocating for a particular perspective, essayists must wield words with precision to engage and persuade.

    The Symbiosis of Ideas and Structure

    At the crossroads of book and essay writing lies the symbiosis of ideas and structure. Crafting a book necessitates a sprawling canvas, allowing for intricate plots and character development. On the other hand, essays thrive on clarity and conciseness, demanding a structured approach to convey arguments persuasively.

    A well-structured essay or book is a testament to the writer’s ability to organize thoughts effectively. Each paragraph serves as a building block, contributing to the overall coherence of the piece. This shared emphasis on structure highlights the foundational role it plays in transforming ideas into compelling narratives, be they fictional or analytical.

    The Role of “Write My Essays For Me” Services

    In the labyrinth of literary creation, the demand for expertise often leads writers to seek external support. “Write my essays for me” services emerge as guiding beacons, offering a helping hand to those navigating the intricate web of words. These services cater to the diverse needs of writers, providing not only technical assistance in essay composition but also serving as invaluable collaborators in the book-writing process.

    For essayists, these services offer a lifeline, helping to refine arguments, enhance clarity, and ensure adherence to academic standards. On the other front, authors crafting books find solace in the proficiency of these services, relying on skilled editors to polish their manuscripts. The collaboration between writers and essay services underscores the shared commitment to excellence in written expression.

    In conclusion, the realms of book and essay writing converge in their dedication to articulate ideas and narratives. Whether embarking on the odyssey of a novel or the exploration of intellectual discourse, the craft of writing demands a unique blend of creativity, structure, and expertise. In this journey, “write my essays for me” services emerge as trusted allies, facilitating the transformation of raw ideas into eloquent prose.

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  • Syria: Assad’s endgame

    Global experts and decision makers discuss, debate and analyse a key news story. On this episode- How is Assad’s hold on power in Syria changing?

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  • Photos revealing hidden histories of the Middle East

    From same-sex kisses and men in drag, to nude portraits and children posing with assault rifles, the Arab Image Foundation is replete with startling and sensationalist photographs of the Middle East. But it is the foundation’s thousands of photographs documenting day-to-day activities, neglected traditions and vanished ways of life that make it a unique and fascinating resource. For more than 20 years, the foundation has preserved its archives, published books and organised exhibitions, but its collections have been difficult for the public to access. Now, the launch of a new online platform has made thousands of previously unseen photographs accessible to the world, revealing forgotten moments and untold stories.

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  • Tunisian democracy at a crossroads

    Tunisia has emerged as the one success story of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. While Libya, Yemen, and Syria have descended into civil war, and Egypt into military dictatorship, Tunisia has instead transitioned to and thus far maintained its democracy. Its transition has benefited from several structural advantages, including a homogenous population, a politically weak military, a strong civil society, and a relative balance of power between Islamists and secularists. Yet Tunisia’s transition is still fragile. In recent years, the Tunisian public has become disillusioned with democracy for its failure to improve the economy. Meanwhile, governing elites have pursued a series of problematic laws and measures indicative of democratic backsliding.

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  • My House in Cairo

    The weekend after I purchased a new Honda sedan, I hired a small construction crew. They arrived at my apartment, in Cairo, early on a Friday morning. The foreman told me that it was important to work quickly, because the police weren’t likely to be active before Friday prayers.

    With my wife, Leslie, and our twin daughters, I lived on the ground floor of an old Art Deco residence that I called the spiderweb building. It was impossible to enter or leave the place without passing a series of decorative wrought-iron webs. A six-foot-high webbed gate stood at the building’s main entrance, and then, inside the lobby, an old-fashioned elevator was encased in a web-shaped cage. The front door to our apartment was marked by little black spiderwebs. At the back of the apartment, another door led to a small garden with a webbed fence. This fence ended in a pair of spiderweb gates that were large enough to admit a car.

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  • If You Were a Sack of Cumin

    Hussein soon suggested that they toss the body out on the roadside, asking his brother and sister how confident they were that they would pass other checkpoints without trouble. They would be right back where they started if the next checkpoint agents discovered that their father was a wanted man. He added that the dogs were eating plenty of bodies nowadays, so what difference did it make? Why didn’t they just leave it or bury it anywhere and go back to Damascus?

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  • Adonis’s Poems of Ruin and Renewal

    Adonis’s Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is the central book of poems in modern Arabic literature. Published in 1961, its status in Arabic is comparable to The Waste Land in English or Duino Elegies in German. (Adonis collaborated on a translation of Eliot’s long poem while writing Mihyar). Like those works of European high modernism, Adonis’s collection is poetry of large and explicit ambitions. It evokes classical, Koranic, and Biblical sources on almost every page, even when announcing its own originality. It is a work of visionary exultation and powerful melancholy. It imagines a world of blight and barrenness and picks through the ruins for hints of resurrection.

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  • Arab films: Seven independent movies to watch out for

    For many years, the Arab presence at the Cannes Film Festival has been predicable and tiresome. While the number of participating films has substantially increased, the all-too-familiar themes, subjects and forms remained unchanged. But this was not the case in 2019 – or at least not entirely.

    This year, the independently run sidebars of the festival, known as Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight, demonstrated a boldness and unpredictability – even frivolity – in their choice of films, which was absent from the official line-up, including the main competition.

    This was especially obvious when it came to Arab productions. The official selection opted for the obvious. Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight, on the other hand, selected a deliciously acerbic religious satire, a brilliantly opaque thriller, and possibly the most bonkers Arab picture that has been screened on the French Riviera.

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  • ‘Times’ Deputy Counsel On Fighting For Press Freedom In The Trump Era

    TERRY GROSS, HOST:

    This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. You probably know my guest, the New York Times deputy general counsel David McCraw, from a letter he wrote that went viral. It was in response to a letter from Donald Trump’s lawyer threatening to sue the Times for libel. McCraw will read that letter in a minute.

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  • The Fresno Bee and the War on Local News

    Local newspapers like The Fresno Bee have long been an endangered institution in America, and that was before California Rep. Devin Nunes began waging a public campaign against his hometown paper. Zach Baron spent time with the reporters fighting to keep news alive in an age when the forces they cover are working equally hard to destroy them.

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  • BuzzFeed and the digital media meltdown

    IN RETROSPECT, BUZZFEED CEO JONAH PERETTI’S March 2014 memo to staff, titled “Is History Repeating Itself?” reads like an extended challenge to the rule that every headline ending with a question mark can be answered with a “no.” Peretti told his LOLing troops that “we’re at the start of a new golden age of media” and compared their digital outfit
    to an early-stage Time Inc.

    So much can change in five years. “There were times when people would overhype digital media and be irrationally bullish about it,” Peretti tells me, not mentioning that he was one of those people. “And there are times when people are irrationally bearish about it. We’re probably at a moment where people are being more pessimistic than they should be.

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  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Believes in Humane Capitalism

    “We’re living in a time in which I feel a sense of urgency,” says Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian author of Americanah and the viral 2012 TEDx Talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” a slogan that has reverberated its way into a Beyoncé song and onto tote bags and Dior t-shirts. This month, she has again merged personal aesthetics with political values in a collaboration with the fine jewelry brand Foundrae: all of the retail proceeds from her “Freedom of Expression” medallion, which employs Foundrae’s signature lexicon of dainty symbols, will benefit PEN America, a nonprofit that promotes the intersection of literature and human rights. “I used to joke, many years ago, thank God for PEN because if the Nigerian government ever throws me in prison at least somebody will care,” says Adichie. Today, she’s savoring Edith Wharton novels and spending time with her daughter to combat the constant barrage of outraging news. As she says, “our time here is short and we need to make the most of it.”

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  • In Praise of Public Libraries

    Years ago, I lived in a remote mountain town that had never had a public library. The town was one of the largest in New York State by area but small in population, with a couple thousand residents spread out over about two hundred square miles. By the time my husband and I moved there, the town had lost most of its economic base—in the nineteenth century it had supported a number of tanneries and mills—and our neighbors were mainly employed seasonally, if at all. When the regional library system’s bookmobile was taken out of service, the town had no easy access to books. The town board proposed a small tax increase to fund a library, something on the order of ten dollars per household. It was soundly defeated. The dominant sentiments seemed to be “leave well enough alone” and “who needs books?” Then there was the man who declared that “libraries are communist.”

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  • The Truth Is Hard. But for a New York Times Lawyer, Defending It Is Fun.

    For many Americans, the greatest reason to cheer during the sleepy, low-scoring game that was Super Bowl LIII was not the Patriots’ victory. In certain circles, it was the highly anticipated, multimillion-dollar commercial produced by the Washington Post, featuring the voice of Tom Hanks and heroic footage of journalists from various outlets that proclaimed, over a soaring score, these simple truths: “Knowing empowers us, knowing helps us decide, knowing keeps us free.”

    It was a good ad, inspiring even. Who doesn’t love Tom Hanks? But you could find The Washington Post commercial uplifting and also saddening, insofar as it was deemed necessary.

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  • Russian expansion in the Middle East is a ‘clear reality on the ground,’ WEF president says

    World Economic Forum (WEF) President Borge Brende spoke to CNBC on Sunday, discussing his take on the evolving geopolitical landscape in the Middle East.

    It’s no news that Russian presence in the region has grown. American withdrawal and disengagement from several of the region’s hotspots has coincided with an apparent shift eastward, Brende said, inviting Moscow to exert its influence over that of the U.S.

    “I think there is a clear reality on the ground that we see more of a Russian footprint in this region,” Brende told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble during the WEF on the Middle East and Africa in Amman, Jordan.

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  • Egyptian actors who criticized Sissi in Washington are kicked out of union

    On Monday, actors Amr Waked and Khaled Abol Naga spoke out against Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi at a Capitol Hill event in Washington intended to draw attention to proposed changes to the Egyptian constitution that could let Sissi serve until 2034.

    On Tuesday, they found out that they were expelled from the Egyptian actors’ union, which accused them of treason.

    “I found out last night. A friend of mine sent me a scanned copy of the decision. I wasn’t really surprised, to be honest,” Waked, perhaps best known stateside for his roles in 2005′s “Syriana” and 2014′s “Lucy,” told The Washington Post.

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  • ‘For Sama’ Syrian war documentary offers haunting look at motherhood in Aleppo

     Laying on her bed in Aleppo, Waad al-Kateab greeted Sama, her giggly newborn daughter, like she did most mornings, fearful of arrests, bombings and death. The Syrian mother wondered how she could bring Sama into a world filled with terror and war.

    “Good morning, sweetheart,” the filmmaker said to her daughter in the documentary “For Sama.” “There are a lot of airstrikes today, right?”

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  • A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions

    Dan Mallory, a book editor turned novelist, is tall, good-looking, and clever. His novel, “The Woman in the Window,” which was published under a lightly worn pseudonym, A. J. Finn, was the hit psychological thriller of the past year. Like “Gone Girl,” by Gillian Flynn (2012), and “The Girl on the Train,” by Paula Hawkins (2015), each of which has sold millions of copies, Mallory’s novel, published in January, 2018, features an unreliable first-person female narrator, an apparent murder, and a possible psychopath.

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  • Life Size: A Day in the City

    When Sergio García Sánchez, a Spanish comic-book artist, was given the opportunity to fill a whole room in a museum, he turned to his iPad and decided to sketch, in black-and-white, a single day in a bustling city. The result, produced entirely on an iPad, stretches almost a hundred feet long by five feet high, and just opened at the Centro José Guerrero, in Granada, Spain.

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  • Richard E. Grant on How to Survive Awards Season With Flair

    An Oscar would certainly be nice, but Richard E. Grant doesn’t need a golden statue to walk away from this awards season as a winner.

    The 61-year-old actor landed his first Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Jack Hock, the loyal accomplice of author-turned-literary-forger Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) in the biopic “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”

    Unlike most actors who become jaded by the grind that comes with awards season — its punishing schedule of screenings, interviews on late-night shows, and grip and grins — Grant isn’t taking a single moment for granted.

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  • A new journalism podcast looks to history to counter ‘objectivity’

    THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM COMMUNITY fancies itself a completely neutral estate, the poster child for objectivity. But this conceit is, at best, ahistorical. Like all things, the modern press corps was born into an inequitable society, and its strictures show up in the industry everywhere from hiring practices to how certain communities are covered, if they get coverage at all.

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  • How Esquire lost the Bryan Singer story

    ON FEBRUARY 11, NEWS BROKE that Millennium Films was delaying Bryan Singer’s Red Sonja, which was to begin production this year. This was, on the face of it, a remarkable turn of events. Singer’s Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, had just been nominated for five Oscars. It performed exceedingly well at the box office, as is usually the case with Singer’s movies; all told, they’ve grossed more than a billion dollars.

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  • Another Battle of Algiers

    Protests have stopped President Abdelaziz Bouteflika from seeking another term, but it won’t change the military’s domination of the political system.

    Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president of Algeria, on Monday announced in a letter that he would not seek a fifth term as president and called off the presidential elections scheduled on April 18. He explained that a national conference on political and constitutional reform would be held and a new Constitution written and approved by referendum.

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  • What’s gone wrong with democracy

    The protesters who have overturned the politics of Ukraine have many aspirations for their country. Their placards called for closer relations with the European Union (EU), an end to Russian intervention in Ukraine’s politics and the establishment of a clean government to replace the kleptocracy of President Viktor Yanukovych. But their fundamental demand is one that has motivated people over many decades to take a stand against corrupt, abusive and autocratic governments. They want a rules-based democracy.

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  • The Elusive Langston Hughes

    By the time the British artist Isaac Julien’s iconic short essay-film “Looking for Langston” was released, in 1989, Julien’s ostensible subject, the enigmatic poet and race man Langston Hughes, had been dead for twenty-two years, but the search for his “real” story was still ongoing. There was a sense—particularly among gay men of color, like Julien, who had so few “out” ancestors and wanted to claim the prolific, uneven, but significant writer as one of their own—that some essential things about Hughes had been obscured or disfigured in his work and his memoirs. Born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902, and transplanted to New York City as a strikingly handsome nineteen-year-old, Hughes became, with the publication of his first book of poems, “The Weary Blues” (1926), a prominent New Negro: modern, pluralistic in his beliefs, and a member of what the folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston called “the niggerati,” a loosely formed alliance of black writers and intellectuals that included Hurston, the author and diplomat James Weldon Johnson, the openly gay poet and artist Richard Bruce Nugent, and the novelists Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, and Wallace Thurman (whose 1929 novel about color fixation among blacks, “The Blacker the Berry,” conveys some of the energy of the time).

    In a 1926 essay for The Nation, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes described the group, which came together during the Harlem Renaissance, when hanging out uptown was considered a lesson in cool:

    We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

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