As Neda (not her real name) recounted her ordeal to aid workers at the Mamilyan camp for internally displaced people in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, she showed little emotion, the aid workers said. That is probably a coping mechanism. “If they give in one time and cry, they will not be able to stop crying for a while,” says Rezhna Mohammed, the director of psychological services for the SEED Foundation, which runs a centre in the camp. Neda, though, has only asked for cash (to repay her liberators). Few people in the Middle East seek or receive help for their mental suffering.
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Writing Fiction is an Act of Faith
‘When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? To surrender dreams – this may be madness,‘ says Cervantes in his wondrous Don Quixote.
Writing fiction is an act of faith. You have to believe that the seed of a story planted in the valley of your mind—if only given a chance to grow—will someday in the near or distant future, bear magical fruits. You must believe that the story you are working on–day in, day out for months, years–will someday connect with people you have never met, and probably never will. Like all acts of faith, this, too, is a journey that ventures beyond the boundaries of the self.
But writing fiction is equally an act of doubt. You will disbelieve and question and challenge yourself at every step along the way. You will be pelted with anxieties and panic attacks that come out of nowhere. It makes no difference whether you are writing your first book or fifth or tenth, you will still watch your soul bleed on the whiteness of the page. You will find yourself doubting not only your characters, but also your own skills. You might even ask why on earth are you doing this, plunking away at a computer keyboard or holding a leaking pen as though your life depended on it–though it won’t stop you, the darkness of your thoughts, you will continue writing, for how can you not continue breathing.
Writing is the waltz of faith and doubt. Both are sorely needed.
And you must dance this waltz, night and day, for as long as it takes.
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Why the Art World Has Fallen for Etel Adnan
FOR OVER HALF a century, passionate pilgrims have been drawn to a four-story Belle Epoque building in Paris’s elegant sixth arrondissement. Some still come to see the final home of Albert Camus, the Algerian-born absurdist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. But today, the most fervent among them come to pay homage to Etel Adnan, an artist and writer whose vitality and curiosity belie her 90 years. Like some Delphic cardigan-wearing yogi, Adnan sits in a poufy red chair with her feet barely grazing the floor below and gives her full attention to her interlocutors. Of mixed Greek and Syrian heritage, she speaks at least five languages, in a stream of ambiguous Mediterranean cadences. Conversation tends to hover around her holy trinity of love, war and poetry-the primary subjects of her nearly dozen books. The arc of Adnan’s own life, punctuated by the fall of an empire, affairs of the heart and mind, tectonic political shifts, exiles and returns, is the stuff of Russian novels.
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VR to inspire humanitarian empathy
It is one thing to say that you understand someone’s pain and worries, but quite another to experience them. From living in a refugee tent to facing the Ebola epidemic, the United Nations is using virtual reality to create awareness of humanitarian crises around the world in hopes of changing how a person acts towards others.
“Virtual reality is the ability to really take part in a story that usually you’re only a passive spectator on. And it’s giving you the possibility to walk in another person’s shoes,” said Gabo Arora, Creative Director and Special Adviser to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Action Campaign.
The campaign is a special initiative of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to empower and inspire people to support their Governments to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 SDGs that aim to alleviate poverty, provide universal education and help the environment.
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Transporting Jurors to Crime Scenes
The promise and hype surrounding virtual reality is spilling into the criminal justice system.
Researchers from Staffordshire University in England announced Tuesday that they’ve been awarded a $200,000 European Commission grant to develop ways of presenting crime-scene evidence to jurors and lawyers through virtual reality.
Caroline Sturdy Colls, a Staffordshire professor of forensic archaeology and genocide investigation, is leading the project.
“A number of novel, digital non-invasive methods,” she said in a statement, have the “potential to…permit access to difficult and/or dangerous environments, create a more accurate record of buried or concealed evidence and provide more effective means of presenting evidence in court.”
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Between Giving Up & Joining Extremists
Ali Othman is among a shrinking band of Syrian rebels in the mountains across from this border town who face an agonizing choice: accept a settlement with a regime they revile or fight alongside al Qaeda’s Islamist allies.
The Syrian army defector and his fellow fighters say they are weakened and cornered after enduring months of bombardment from Russian forces buttressing President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Peace talks ended last month without progress amid a major escalation in violence in the northern city of Aleppo. On Thursday, a day after the U.S. announced a deal with Russia on a fresh cease-fire in Aleppo, Islamist groups targeted regime-held areas of the city with rocket, mortar and sniper fire, according to Syrian state media and U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
“My wife begs me almost each day to leave the mountains,” Mr. Othman, 26 years old, said during a recent visit with his family in Turkey. “She keeps asking me: `Why are you still fighting?’”
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Mindfield: Mental Health in MidEast
WHEN Neda told her children that she might have to kill them, they assented. Such was their suffering after Islamic State kidnapped and enslaved them, along with thousands of other Yazidis, a religious minority, in northern Iraq in 2014. Neda’s husband was taken and presumably killed; her eldest son, just 13 years old, was forced to fight with the jihadists. She shaved off the hair and eyebrows of her two young daughters to make them look boyish and sickly, so that IS rapists might leave them alone. Neda herself was raped, beaten and sold several times before she was bought and freed by relatives last year.
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Films to Understand Modern Arab World
A number of catastrophic events have afflicted the Arab world in recent years. Western news reporting and Hollywood cinema tend to present these crises through disaster footage or stories about Western protagonists in which local people are merely extras. Film from the Arab world is often more complex and nuanced.
Recently, I was preparing the programme for a new season on contemporary film from the Arab world at The Mosaic Rooms in London. I have been privileged to watch incredible short and feature length films from Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt. I believe these films make visible what is often invisible to the rest of the world – people’s everyday struggles.
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Immersive Journalism and Virtual Reality
As The New York Times brings new attention to VR, immersive journalism could drive not only changes in the media industry, but mainstream adoption of the technology.
For decades, journalists have been trying to figure out how to better connect audiences to serious events that happen far, far away, and build empathy and understanding. Most recently, media organizations are turning to virtual reality as the possible next step toward that goal. The big news as of late has been The New York Times decision to send 1.2 million Google Cardboard units to subscribers via snail mail. Readers could download the NYTVR app, pop their smartphone into Cardboard, and watch several videos, including an 11-minute documentary on Oleg and two other children ousted from their homes by war called The Displaced.
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Signs of Long-Form Readings Online
In recent years, the news media have followed their audience’s lead and gone mobile, working to make their reporting accessible to the roughly seven-in-ten American adults who own a smartphone. With both a smaller screen size and an audience more apt to be dipping in and out of news, many question what kind of news content will prevail. U.S. public show signs of engaging with long-form articles on cellphones.
One particular area of uncertainty has been the fate of long, in-depth news reports that have been a staple of the mainstream print media in its previous forms. These articles – enabled by the substantial space allotted them – allow consumers to engage with complex subjects in more detail and allow journalists to bring in more sources, consider more points of view, add historical context and cover events too complex to tell in limited words.
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“The Morning They Came For Us”
It has been five years since civil war erupted in Syria. Hundreds of thousands have been killed. More than four million refugees have fled into neighboring countries — creating a crisis that has engulfed Europe. Janine di Giovanni, the Middle East editor for Newsweek, was embedded with the Syrian army. She says reporting on the war in Syria is unlike any other conflict she’s ever covered. And she has reported from dozens of war zones, including Bosnia, Iraq, and Somalia. Guest host Susan Page talks with di Giovanni about the brutal reality of the daily lives of Syrians.
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TV News Stations Are Now Old News
When direct-broadcast satellite provider Dish Network launched Sling TV in February last year, it was eying those swathes of viewers able and willing to pay for television, but not the fat bill that pay-TV companies send their subscribers at the end of the month. For a monthly fee of US$20, Americans can access a bouquet of TV channels anywhere and on any device through Sling TV, including mobile devices and computers.
They don’t have to install a hulking antenna or satellite dish on the roof of their house. In mid-April 2016, Dish Network threatened that it would cut its viewers’ access to the cable channels operated by Viacom. Dish Network was reportedly irked by requests from Viacom for an unreasonable increase (“millions of dollars,” according to Dish Network) in fees for carrying Viacom-owned channels such as MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon in spite of the decreasing audiences of these channels. In the end, they reached a deal.
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Yemeni Artist Covers War Ruins In Color
On the first day of Saudi Arabia’s intervention into Yemen’s civil war in March of last year, warplanes bombed a residential compound on the outskirts of the capital Sanaa, killing dozens of people inside.
A Yemeni human rights organization said a coalition led by Saudi Arabia killed 27 civilians, including 15 children, in the strikes on the Bani Hawat neighborhood on March 26, 2015.
Yemeni artist Murad Subay headed to the compound with a group of friends a few weeks later, and together with local kids painted 27 flowers on its walls, 15 of them with just one leaf to symbolize the children whose lives were lost.
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NPR visuals team use analytics
How many analytics platforms is your newsroom using? The answer to that question goes back to, or should go back to, what the organisation is trying to measure on the web and how it interprets what every engagement or audience development editor is trying to find a definition for: a story’s impact.
Back in November, NPR received a $35,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to develop an analytics bot that would help the visuals team take better action informed by what they measured about their work, but also rethink their goals and definition of success.
“We’d been playing around with alternative metrics for longer than one and a half years and this idea came out of our questioning of what our mission is, why have a visuals team at a radio organisation?”, said Brian Boyer, editor of NPR’s visuals team.
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Media multitasking
As news organizations work to enhance their digital presence, they are experimenting with ways to improve their audience experience. As technology evolves, readers, viewers and listeners are demanding more than straight facts from a single source of information. With this in mind, journalists are incorporating multiple media platforms into their work to offer audiences more information and context. For example, FRONTLINE creates investigative documentaries that appear on TV. As viewers watch a documentary, they can use their laptops to access additional information on the subject on FRONTLINE’s website. Meanwhile, audience members also can use their mobile phones to interact with FRONTLINE via social media while they view the program. News consumers are increasingly adept at using two or more media platforms simultaneously to explore the topic of a single news story.
As digital technology has become more common, so has this “media multitasking.” As academic scholars study the trend, their findings inevitably will be helpful to newsroom leaders in developing strategies for advertising and audience engagement.
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‘Islamic State’s’ most wanted
In this five part series, BBC World incorporates animation to tell the story of a group of Syrian teenagers who decided to resist when the so-called Islamic State group took control of their city. They became citizen journalists and used the internet to show the reality of life in Raqqa. They are the founders of the page “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently”.
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Smuggling — An Act of Resistance
More than twenty days had passed since the start of their long journey to Europe, but not one went by without Somar and his sisters daydreaming about their parents following them to Germany. This was well before they made it there themselves.
Their failure to mobilize international support (through the Edirne demonstration, read Part II) to grant them safe and legal entry to Europe had accentuated their nostalgia for home. A frustrated and overburdened Somar began attaching a degree of legitimacy to the idea of getting smuggled.
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Ethical challenges covering refugee crisis
It can often be challenging for journalists to report on harrowing events or in difficult situations where the people involved are in need of help. Should journalists stop the reporting process to assist those around them? Or should their main priority be to continue gathering interviews to get a story back to their publisher?
The refugee crisis is a core example of this, where journalists are required to produce content for their news organisations back home, but are often in a position where they may feel like interrupting their work in order to give assistance to those around them.
In this podcast, Simon Shuster, reporter for New York based magazine Time explains the ‘humanitarian temptation’ that journalists face when covering the crisis.
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Svetlana Alexievich: ‘Chernobyl kills’
Svetlana Alexievich was at home in Minsk when the phone rang. For some years, she says, rumours had swirled that the Swedish Academy was considering her name. She had already received many honours. Still, it had been more than half a century since a non-fiction writer – Winston Churchill in 1953 – had won literature’s top award. The news from Stockholm was indeed stunning: Alexievich had won the 2015 Nobel prize in literature.
“This is such an important prize, such an enormous prize, you’d have to be a complete idiot to expect to win it,” she tells me. Over the next few hours the phone at her modest two-room flat in Belarus’s capital rang unceasingly. Callers included Mikhail Gorbachev, the French and German presidents, friends and well-wishers. Thousands of people wrote to her.
Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter Read more One person, though, “kept silent”. This was Belarus’s implacable dictator of 21 years, Alexander Lukashenko. Lukashenko faced a dilemma: the award was self-evidently a major honour for Belarus, and yet Alexievich was one of his most prominent critics. At home, officially at least, she was an unperson. Her books are unpublished, available only from Russia, or smuggled in via Lithuania in small underground editions. Her name is missing from school textbooks.
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The Assad Files
The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times, always in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty miles to the border, through eleven rebel checkpoints, where the soldiers had come to think of him as a local, a lawyer whose wartime misfortunes included a commute on their section of the road. Sometimes he brought them snacks or water, and he made sure to thank them for protecting civilians like himself. Now, on a summer afternoon, he loaded the truck with more than a hundred thousand captured Syrian government documents, which had been buried in pits and hidden in caves and abandoned homes.
He set out at sunset. To the fighters manning the checkpoints, it was as if he were invisible. Three reconnaissance vehicles had driven ahead, and one confirmed by radio what the investigator hoped to hear: no new checkpoints. Typically, the border was sealed, but soldiers from the neighboring country waved him through. He drove until he reached a Western embassy, where he dropped off the cargo for secure transfer to Chris Engels, an American lawyer. Engels expected the papers to include evidence linking high-level Syrian officials to mass atrocities. After a decade spent training international criminal-justice practitioners in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, Engels now leads the regime-crimes unit of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an independent investigative body founded in 2012, in response to the Syrian war.
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Life Sings with Many Voices
Last spring, when the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano made some rueful comments about his classic anti-globalization, anti-imperialist history Open Veins of Latin America (1971), the Economist was delighted. At last there could be agreement that “capitalism is the only route to development in Latin America,” the magazine crowed. Galeano’s recantation could hardly have been more significant: “it was almost as if Jesus’s disciples had admitted that the New Testament was a big misunderstanding.”
Indeed, in the forty years since its publication Open Veins had achieved semi-mythic status. Uncompromising and accusatory, the book told of a centuries-long capitalist plunder operation, in which fruit companies, oil drillers, slave traders, and conquistadors collaborated to despoil the Americas. That story, containing more than a little truth, resonated with populist movements. The book became an international bestseller and the scourge of right-wing governments. It may have reached the height of its notoriety when Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama a copy at the Summit of the Americas in 2009.
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New favorite bookshop?
Book lovers who find themselves easily distracted may welcome the brutal approach by a new bookstore in London. In a bold move, Libreria has declared itself a ‘digital detox zone’, banning its customers from using mobile phones and tablets within the shop. The ban is part of an endeavour by the store to immerse the visitor in the visceral joys of reading and the pleasure of physical books, as well as to reawaken the art of real-life conversation, debates and talks, a sense of conviviality and a taste of the unexpected.
Visitors to the shop may take photos, but if they’re spotted texting, browsing the internet, posting or communicating with anyone outside the shop’s four walls, they are politely requested to stop. “The rule isn’t enforced in a draconian way, but we do want to create a welcoming space away from digital overload,” Libreria’s Paddy Butler tells BBC Culture. “If you’re doing business on your computer all day, then being in a space full of traditional books allows you to escape, browse, talk about books, and discuss ideas. We all need a break from digital distraction and noise – it’s not good to be plugged in all the time.” So how have customers reacted to the ban of their beloved phones so far? According to Butler, positively: “They mostly say ‘Thank you’.”
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Iraqi forces face heavy resistance in Hit
Heavy resistance has slowed Iraqi forces Tuesday as they pushed forward toward the center of a town held by Islamic State militants in western Anbar province, commanders at the scene said. Hundreds of roadside bombs, car bombs and heavy mortar fire slowed advancing Iraqi troops to a near halt Tuesday after entering the small town of Hit the previous day.
Hit — which lies along the Euphrates River in a valley in Anbar’s sprawling desert — is strategically important as it sits along an IS supply line that links territory controlled by the extremist Sunni group in Iraq and in Syria. Through the line, IS ferries fighters and supplies from Syria into Iraq.
Iraqi troops entered Hit on Monday, under cover of heavy airstrikes and a week after launching the operation to retake the town. Their advance has been stalled as tens of thousands of civilians become trapped by the fighting. A political crisis in Baghdad as well as poor weather conditions further slowed the push.
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Jordan superhero comic book
When Zaid Adham and Yasser Alireza met in the comic-book section of Dubai bookshop Kinokuniya they had little idea they would embark on a unique storytelling collaboration.
What Alireza didn’t know was that Jordan-born Zaid had won a Middle East Film & Comic Con (MEFCC) writing award for his outline for a new Middle East superhero comic and needed an artist to bring his vision to life.
And what Adham didn’t know was that Alireza, who hails from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, was an MEFCC award-winning artist looking to fulfil a childhood dream of working in comics.
Talking to the pair, who will launch the first issue of their comic book, Wayl, at the next MEFCC, from April 7 to 9, it’s not difficult to believe that fate brought them together.
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New York Times podcast team
Another news organization has decided to invest in podcasts, and this one’s a biggie: The New York Times is creating a new audio team that will work to launch a batch of news and opinion podcasts this year and more in 2017.
To start, the Times will “launch a handful of shows with outside partners which, like Modern Love, have a strong prospect of quickly attracting a wide audience,” Kinsey Wilson, editor for innovation and strategy (and formerly the EVP and chief content officer at NPR), and Sam Dolnick, senior editor, wrote in a memo released Thursday. (The full text is below.) The Times will then “use those shows as a platform from which we can build audience for shows produced within The Times that are as integral to our coverage as our live events and visual journalism efforts.”
“We haven’t settled on themes or particular shows yet,” Wilson told me. “But there’s no shortage of great ideas in the building. In the early going, we will probably favor things that have some shelf life as opposed to news that’s highly perishable, simply because we want to build audience quickly.
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Investigative journalism in Mideast
In the past year, a group of Arab journalists has been working secretly in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, and Yemen as part of a global network of investigative reporters mining the so called “Panama Papers.”
They found that some Arab strongmen and their business partners are linked to offshore companies and bank accounts. They also discovered that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies have been able to skirt international sanctions by registering shell companies in places like the Seychelles.
What’s astonishing about this story is not that Arab dictators are going offshore to hide their wealth and evade sanctions. It’s that a community of Arab journalists is continuing to do investigative reporting in a region where there is increasingly little tolerance for accountability of any kind.
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