From tragedy to celebration, from promising beginnings to somber farewells, these images capture a momentous 2018.
Through photographers’ lenses, we saw traumatized students led from bloody classrooms and watched California burn. We said goodbye to the world’s last male northern white rhino, and looked in the eyes of political leaders under scrutiny in a divisive time.
Amid the adversity and conflict, there were moments of inspiration, too: a royal wedding that showed a modern marriage; an Olympic athlete flying breathtakingly high.
Photographers pointed their cameras in every direction around the world to reveal these scenes — at times risking their own safety — and brought us along as virtual witnesses. Here, TIME’s photo editors present an unranked selection of the 100 best images of the year.
Warning: Some of the following images are graphic in nature and might be disturbing to some viewers.
Before the clock struck midnight and 2018 faded away, we asked you on Twitter to set some intentions, resolution, goals — whatever you wanna call ‘em — for your podcast in 2019. What you wrote was awe-inspiring and motivating for the whole Anchor community, so we wanted to respond with some tips and tricks to help you achieve your resolutions.
Congrats on taking the leap! Our production team created this handy guide about starting a podcast. And you’re so right — consistency is important when establishing loyal listeners. We find that it is beneficial to set a regular day and time when listeners can expect to hear your show, and be sure to mention when that is on your podcast. We also believe that consistency is important in terms of the tone, format, and topics discussed. In the early stages of your podcast, you may feel like you working to find your voice, and that’s okay. But once you find it and get a positive audience response, stick with it!
A Daughter, Her Father, 9/11 and “The Weight of Dust”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, eight-year-old Amy Gaines’ father, Scott, dropped her off at the school bus stop. It was supposed to be the first day of his last vacation before his retirement after 20 years as a New York City police officer.
But then, news broke that a plane — and then, a second one — had flown into the World Trade Center. So Scott Gaines headed to Ground Zero, where he would continue to work for the next two months.
Like many 9/11 first responders, he would later be diagnosed with cancer. In fact, the projected death toll from illnesses potentially linked to 9/11 is larger than the number of people who died that day.
In a new episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch called “The Weight of Dust,” Amy Gaines — now a series coordinating producer at FRONTLINE — embarks on a deeply personal quest to understand the long arm of 9/11 through the story of what happened to her father and thousands of others diagnosed with illnesses believed to be caused by exposure to toxic chemicals at Ground Zero.
A duty to inform, as well as Entertain: The BBC on the Edge of an Abyss
There were promising signs at the beginning of this year that BBC News and Current Affairs were preparing to rescue their reputation after a torrid time during the EU referendum. Their coverage in 2016 was widely panned by senior insiders like John Simpson and Justin Webb for not checking the factual claims made during Brexit debates, and putting too much weight on ‘balancing’ opinions rather than some more objective test of accuracy and truth.
But behind the scenes something big was stirring. For nearly two months in early 2018 BBC One’s flagship documentary programme, Panorama, was looking at a stunning set of revelations from two whistle-blowers.
There were promising signs at the beginning of this year that the BBC News and Current Affairs were preparing to rescue their reputation.
The first was the testimony of Chris Wylie, the former head of research at Cambridge Analytica. Founded by Alexander Nix, Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon in 2013, the data-based electioneering company would deploy military-grade propaganda tools and weaponise the hacked information of 170 million Facebook users, both in the 2016 UK EU referendum and the US presidential election of Donald Trump.
THIS WEEK, AS A LONG-PREDICTED collapse seemed to hit digital media, we saw a few of the tried-and-true ways managers use to explain to employees why they’re laying them off.
BuzzFeed chose the language of corporation-as-family, with founder Jonah Peretti telling staff that making the decision was “upsetting and disappointing.” Verizon went with meaningless corporate-speak. “Today marks a strategic step toward better execution of our plans for growth and innovation into the future,” a spokesperson said.
The results looked the same in the end: a 15 percent reduction in headcount at BuzzFeed, resulting in the layoffs of more than 200 people, and 800 cuts at Verizon Media Group, which includes HuffPost and Yahoo News.
The Deep Pathology at the Heart of a Scandal at Der Spiegel
On the morning of December 19th, the editors of Der Spiegel called a staff meeting in the lobby of its headquarters, in Hamburg. The magazine’s offices occupy an immense but elegant building, with rows of windows tinged by the emerald color of the city’s waterways. An inscription on the wall near the entrance offers an imploring quote from the magazine’s founder, Rudolf Augstein: “Sagen, was ist”—Say what is. At the meeting, the editors told the staff that Claas Relotius, one of the publication’s star reporters, had invented characters, conversations, and other details in many of the dozens of stories he published in the magazine in the past seven years. The weekly production of a magazine is intensively collaborative and necessarily collective. The reputation of Der Spiegel, perhaps the most prestigious magazine in Europe, rests in no small part on the esteem of its fact-checking department, which employs at least sixty people full time. Many of the staff members at the meeting, one Spiegel reporter told me later, were close to tears. “We were all shocked and sad,” the reporter said. “It went to the core of how we understood our work. How could one single person be so harmful to all that we have been working on and pride ourselves on?”
A month earlier, Relotius had e-mailed Juan Moreno, a freelancer he was working with on a story about immigration at the U.S. border. Relotius complained that Moreno’s sections of the piece, which followed a twenty-five year-old Honduran woman travelling to the U.S. with her daughter, sounded like a “bad movie.” Relotius’s contributions, on the other hand, were the stuff of Tarantino; he’d embedded with a group of vigilante patrollers from Arizona, who went by the aliases Pain, Luger, and Ghost, and who waited for migrants on the American side of the border, outfitted with bulletproof vests and night-vision devices. Moreno, for his part, thought that Relotius’s sections were “too shiny,” and noticed that certain facts seemed off-kilter.
A September morning in Baghdad. Traffic halted at checkpoints and roadblocks as bureaucrats filed behind blast walls and the temperature climbed to a hundred and fifteen degrees. At the Central Criminal Court, a guard ran his baton along the bars of a small cell holding dozens of terrorism suspects awaiting trial. They were crammed on a wooden bench and on the floor, a sweaty tangle of limbs and dejected expressions. Many were sick or injured—covered in scabies, their joints twisted and their bones cracked. Iraqi prisons have a uniform code—different colors for pretrial suspects, convicts, and those on death row—but several who had not yet seen a judge or a lawyer were already dressed as if they had been sentenced to death.
Down the hall, the aroma of Nescafé and cigarettes filled a windowless room, where defense lawyers sat on couches, balancing stacks of paper on their laps. Most were staring at their phones; others sat in silence, arms crossed, eyes closed. In terrorism cases, lawyers are usually denied access to their clients until the hearing begins.
On Christmas Eve, Abderrazak Zorgui, a thirty-two-year-old television reporter, posted a chilling cell-phone video shot in Kasserine, a city in western Tunisia that dates back to ancient Roman times. “I have decided today to put a revolution in motion,” he said, looking intently into the camera. “In Kasserine, there are people dying of hunger. Why? Are we not humans? We’re people just like you. The unemployed people of Kasserine, the jobless, the ones who have no means of subsistence, the ones who have nothing to eat.” Zorgui, who had short brown hair and wispy hair on his chin, then held up a clear bottle of gasoline. “Here’s the petrol,” he said. “I’m going to set myself on fire in twenty minutes.” His video was live-streamed onto YouTube. In his poignant farewell, Zorgui added, “Whoever wishes to support me will be welcome. I am going to protest alone. I am going to set myself on fire, and, if at least one person gets a job thanks to me, I will be satisfied.”
The flames Zorgui lit quickly consumed his body. He died just days away from the eighth anniversary of the Arab Spring, which was started when another young Tunisian set himself on fire, on December 17, 2010, to protest injustice, corruption, and desperate living conditions.
Arabic Modernism was a literary movement of exiles and émigrés who planted their flag in West Beirut during the mid-’50s, when the Lebanese capital became a meeting ground for intellectuals from across the region. West Beirut, a neighborhood known as Hamra, was “the closest the Arab world could ever get to having its own Greenwich Village.” For a brief twenty-year period, until the outbreak of civil war in 1975, Hamra was a contact zone for artists and militants from the far Left to the far Right, nationalists and internationalists, experimentalists and traditionalists. In this highly politicized bohème, journals of ideas flourished, and each coterie had its own café. Local banks were flush with deposits from the newly oil-rich states of the Gulf, helping to finance a construction boom that quadrupled the built area of the city in the decade following World War II. This intellectual and economic ferment turned Beirut into a magnet for disaffected thinkers from within Lebanon as well as from neighboring countries. It was a place with all the characteristics of what Roger Shattuck, in his study of the early Parisian avant-garde, has called “cosmopolitan provincialism”: an eclectic community of outsiders living on the margins and snitching tips on taste, style, and ideas from elsewhere.
How far can the U.S. really retreat from the Middle East?
The near-universal scorn heaped on President Trump for his hasty and reckless decision to yank U.S. forces out of Syria, and the enduring confusion since then over the administration’s actual plans, have obscured a larger and more significant development: the strengthening of a bipartisan movement in Washington seeking a broad retreat from the Middle East.
No one, up to and including Trump’s top aides, thinks he was right to suddenly announce a 30-day withdrawal timetable for the 2,000 American troops in eastern Syria after a phone call with the president of Turkey. But since that bombshell dropped last month, the idea of a Syria pullout, and a retrenchment in the region more generally, has attracted quite a bit of support, including from some surprising quarters.
It was one of the Mossad’s most daring, complex and longest-running operations. But only now, 37 years on, is the story of a Red Sea diving resort run by the agency getting its moment in the sun.
“Operation Brothers,” which ran for over three years in the early 1980s, was a breathtaking mission. At its heart was the Arous Holiday Village, a small beach resort billed as the “diving and desert recreation center of Sudan.”
According to a brochure distributed to European travel agencies, Arous offered a combination of desert vistas, sandy beaches and coral reefs, including real shipwrecks off the East African coast for diving enthusiasts to explore.
But here’s what the brochure didn’t say: It was all a front – devised and maintained by the Israeli intelligence agency, whose operatives would visit Sudanese refugee camps with trucks, load them up with Ethiopian Jews (also known as Beta Israel), embark on treacherous journeys across Sudan back to the resort, from where the Ethiopian Jews would be shipped or flown to Israel.
Fuel truck driver Ali Astal wouldn’t dare cross this country brimming with guns and militias without a Kalashnikov or two stashed under the dashboard.
But when he reaches the Mukalla city limits, he gamely surrenders his weapons at a checkpoint.
“This is for the city’s security,” he said as a soldier wrote out a receipt so he might collect the guns on his way out. Mukalla, former Al Qaeda bastion of about 500,000 people, is one of the safest cities in a nation torn apart by a brutal civil war that has claimed at least 10,000 lives, displaced 2 million and forced the internationally recognized government into exile. It may be the only place in Yemen that doesn’t allow civilians to carry firearms in public, a common sight elsewhere.
But two years after troops from the United Arab Emirates and their local allies reclaimed the city, a port on the Arabian Sea, residents are growing restless. Though the relative security is a welcome relief from bombings and shootings that were once commonplace, lasting stability will depend on reconstruction and economic development, and there has been little progress on those fronts.
The mind plays strange tricks sometimes, especially after a tragedy. When I sat down to write this story about the Saudi regime’s homicidal obsession with the Muslim Brotherhood, the first person I thought I’d call was Jamal Khashoggi. For more than 20 years I phoned him or met with him, even smoked the occasional water pipe with him, as I looked for a better understanding of his country, its people, its leaders, and the Middle East. We often disagreed, but he almost always gave me fresh insights into the major figures of the region, starting with Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, and the political trends, especially the explosion of hope that was called the Arab Spring in 2011. He would be just the man to talk to about the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood, because he knew both sides of that bitter relationship so well.
And then, of course, I realized that Jamal is dead, murdered precisely because he knew too much.
Although the stories keep changing, there is now no doubt that 33-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the power in front of his decrepit father’s throne, had put out word to his minions that he wanted Khashoggi silenced, and the hit-team allegedly understood that as “wanted dead or alive.” But the [petro]buck stops with MBS, as bin Salman’s called. He’s responsible for a gruesome murder just as Henry II was responsible for the murder of Thomas Becket when he said, “Who will rid me of that meddlesome priest?” In this case, a meddlesome journalist.
If you had to pick a year in the past decade when the contradictions of the American-Saudi relationship seemed likeliest to explode into crisis, 2018 would not be the obvious choice.
You might pick 2011, when Arab Spring protests compelled the United States to support Middle Eastern democracy movements that the Saudi government saw as mortal threats, or 2013, when Saudi Arabia supported an Egyptian military coup that the United States had tried to prevent and that signaled the end of the region’s democratic moment.
Or perhaps even 2016, by which point the Saudi-led war in Yemen had become one of the worst humanitarian disasters in years, and one in which the United States had gotten itself entangled.
But you would be wrong. Instead, the informal alliance has reached its greatest point of crisis this year, when circumstances would seem to point toward its strengthening. The two countries are aligned on every major policy issue, particularly Iran. Their leaders are closer than at any point in a decade.
Khashoggi case could complicate U.S.-Saudi relations
The disappearance and alleged killing last week of dissident Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi while he was visiting the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul is only the latest challenge to a U.S.-Saudi relationship that both governments have diligently cultivated.
The Trump administration has said little beyond expressing public concern over Khashoggi’s fate, and the kingdom has sharply denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. In private, officials from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on down have been frustrated with the lack of a substantive response to direct high-level queries, according to administration officials.
Confirmation that Khashoggi was killed — as some senior Turkish officials have charged — or even his disappearance at Saudi hands is likely to spark a new round of congressional pressure to reassess the relationship with Riyadh.
As part of my Social Media for Journalists class in London this summer, students are required to come to the first meeting of the week with two stories charting recent developments in the social field.
This could be:
•New products (e.g. the launch of IGTV )
•Organization Analysis (e.g. How Vogue diversified away from Facebook by Max Willens in Digiday)
•User data/insights (e.g. this piece in recode on the growth of Instagram and Snapchat)
•New research (Misinformation and biases infect social media, both intentionally and accidentally by Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Indiana University and Filippo Menczer, Indiana University
They then share one of these stories / developments with the class in a rapid roundtable.
George Orwell titled a regular column he wrote for a British newspaper in the mid-1940s “As I Please.” Meaning that he would write exactly what he believed. My Saudi colleague Jamal Khashoggi has always had that same insistent passion for telling the truth about his country, no matter what.
Khashoggi’s fate is unknown as I write, but his colleagues at The Post and friends around the world fear that he was murdered after he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last Tuesday.
I have known Khashoggi for about 15 years and want to share here some of the reasons he is beloved in our profession and the news of his disappearance has been such a shock.
Journalists can sometimes seem dry and remote, living in the flat two dimensions of a newspaper page. Khashoggi was a tall, reserved man, austere in the long, white thobe he wore until he went into exile in the United States last year. But in his work, he has always been full of life and daring; he embodied the restless curiosity and refusal to compromise on principle that are the saving graces of our business.
My name is Khalid,” he tells me, and I want to believe him. After all, he has traveled the world as royalty—the son of the king of Saudi Arabia, no less. Leading international investors know him as His Royal Highness Khalid bin al-Saud. He moved in an entourage of Rolls-Royces and Ferraris, his every whim tended to by uniformed housekeepers and armed bodyguards. A suave British-born C.E.O. handled his business affairs, and a well-connected international banker marketed his investment deals to a select few, leaving him to live a life of astonishing excess.
Ever since he was a boy, he had been pitted against his royal brothers in an expensive game—to see who could “outdo the other one” in spending, he liked to say. Khalid was surely winning. He was in negotiations to purchase 30 percent of the famed Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach for $440 million, and he was selling early access to what promised to be the biggest I.P.O. in history: the initial public offering of Aramco, the Saudi oil giant. Until last June, when the Saudi government shelved the plan, the I.P.O. was expected to be worth more than $2 trillion.
Khalid could regularly be overheard talking on his phone with the likes of Bill Gates and Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. “I’m sick and tired of Trump calling me and inviting me to the White House!” he often complained. He kept in touch with his father, the Saudi king, on FaceTime, and, if you were lucky, he would let you listen in. But the prince’s favorite companion was Foxy, his beloved Chihuahua, whom he draped in diamonds and designer dog clothes and toted around in a $2,690 Louis Vuitton dog carrier. He stuffed other Louis Vuitton bags with stacks of $100 bills, tossing the money from his jewel-encrusted fingers, one sporting a nine-carat diamond, to those who tended to his needs—flashes of benevolence from an academic genius whose LinkedIn page lists his law studies at Harvard, his master’s in business administration from the University of Southern California, and his top marks at Institut Le Rosey, the elite Swiss boarding school attended by Rockefellers and Rothschilds.
Last month, a U.S. Africa Command spokesperson confirmed in a Task & Purpose report that Marine Corps Raiders were involved in a fierce battle in 2017 in an unnamed North African country, where they fought beside partner forces against militants of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). AFRICOM acknowledged that two Marines received citations for valor but withheld certain details, such as the location—undisclosed due to “classification considerations, force protection, and diplomatic sensitivities.” The command also said the Marine Special Operations unit was engaged while on a three-day train, advise and assist operation. However, subsequent research and analysis strongly suggest U.S. involvement runs much deeper. In fact, the dramatic events described in the award citations obtained by Task & Purpose align with those that took place in Tunisia, which has been combatting a low-level insurgency in its western borderlands for the past seven years. Evidence indicates the battle occurred at Mount Semmama, a mountain range in the Kasserine governorate, near the Algerian border. There, the United States sustained its first casualty in action in Tunisia since World War II.
While not of the same magnitude, the events that AFRICOM confirmed took place on Feb. 28, 2017, echo a disastrous ambush less than seven months later in the village of Tongo Tongo , Niger. In that battle, members of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara killed four Army Special Forces soldiers and four Nigerien partners. U.S. partner forces engaged militants of AQIM’s Tunisian branch, the Uqba ibn Nafaa Battalion (KUBN) in a firefight, which resulted in the killing of one militant. The engagement also necessitated a request for air support to rout the militants. The jihadis then attempted to flank the joint U.S.-Tunisian force from the rear, forcing the Marines to return fire. While engaged on the ground, U.S. forces were also part of the air-support component. When a Tunisian soldier manning an M60 machine gun aboard a helicopter sustained wounds after being shot twice by militants returning accurate fire, a U.S. Marine Raider took control of the machine gun to maintain suppressive fire against the militants and simultaneously treated the wounded Tunisian soldier. The Marine Raider unit and their Tunisian partner force each sustained one casualty in the battle, both of whom recovered from their wounds. At the time, local media reported the incident without alluding to any U.S. participation.
Twitter, as everyone knows, is Hell. Its most hellish aspect is a twofold, self-reinforcing contradiction: you know that you could leave at any time and you know that you will not. (Its pleasures, in this sense, are largely masochistic.) My relationship with the Web site, which has, for years now, been the platform most deeply embedded in my daily—hourly, minutely—routine, has come to feel increasingly perverse. It mostly seems to offer a relentless confirmation that everything is both as awful as possible and somehow getting worse. And everyone else on Twitter appears to feel the same way. (You can check this claim right now by doing a Twitter search for phrases including “extremely normal website” and “I’m losing my mind.”) Last month, the writer Julius Sharpe posted the following exquisitely relatable sentiment: “Whenever someone stops tweeting, I feel like Ben Affleck going to Matt Damon’s house at the end of ‘Good Will Hunting.’ So happy for them.”
So why hasn’t Sharpe done a runner, like Matt Damon lighting out for the territory? And why, more to the point, haven’t I? The obvious answer is that social media is an addiction. The first argument in Jaron Lanier’s recent book, “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now,” is that the nexus of consumer technologies and submerged algorithms, which forms so large a part of contemporary reality, is deliberately engineered to get us hooked. “We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know,” he writes. “We’re all lab animals now.”
The problem, for Lanier, is not technology, per se. The problem is the business model based on the manipulation of individual behavior. Social-media platforms know what you’re seeing, and they know how you acted in the immediate aftermath of seeing it, and they can decide what you will see next in order to further determine how you act—a feedback loop that gets progressively tighter until it becomes a binding force on an individual’s free will. One of the more insidious aspects of this model is the extent to which we, as social-media users, replicate its logic at the level of our own activity: we perform market analysis of our own utterances, calculating the reaction a particular post will generate and adjusting our output accordingly. Negative emotions like outrage and contempt and anxiety tend to drive significantly more engagement than positive ones. This toxic miasma of bad vibes—of masochistic pleasures—is not, in Lanier’s view, an epiphenomenon of social media, but rather the fuel on which it has been engineered to run.
On the Morning of April 11, Abu al-Nour was lounging at home in a small town in Syria’s Idlib Province. It was a pleasant day, and his seven children—ages 2 to 23—were playing outside or studying inside. The house was small, but al-Nour was proud of it. He had built it himself and enjoyed having family and friends over to spend time in the big yard. His wife was cooking lunch in the kitchen.
Al-Nour is a farmer, as were many of the town’s residents, but since the Syrian civil war started in 2011, fuel and fertilizer prices had shot up well beyond his means. Al-Nour had been getting by with the odd construction job or harvest work here and there. The area had fallen to rebel forces in 2012, and though his village was too tiny for the rebels to bother with much, he’d noticed fighters from the Free Idlib Army and Jaysh al-Izza groups passing through on occasion.
Being in rebel-held territory meant government air strikes. The bombings began in 2012 and got worse in 2014. Many villagers fled out of fear. Others fell deeper into poverty, their businesses ruined by the relentless conflict. When the first air strike hit al-Nour’s neighborhood, he says, it killed eight people from one family. Al-Nour tried to help with rescue efforts, but instead was overcome with grief, unable to move. Afterward, he couldn’t stop imagining what could happen to his family. Finally, five long years into this reality, he heard about a service called Sentry from a friend. If he signed up, it would send him a Facebook or Telegram message to let him know a government warplane was heading his way.
Like a man in the first draft of a limerick, Tennys Sandgren is a tennis player from Tennessee. Last winter, after scraping his way onto the list of the top hundred professional players, he secured a spot at the Australian Open. He advanced to the quarter-finals. At a press conference, he responded happily to questions about his unexpected achievement. Then someone asked him about his Twitter feed. Sandgren had tweeted, retweeted, or “liked” disparaging remarks about Muslims and gays; he had highlighted an article suggesting that recent migration into Europe could be described as “Operation European Population Replacement”; he had called Marx’s ideas worse than Hitler’s. He had also promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which accuses Hillary Clinton of human trafficking. Sandgren told reporters that, though he didn’t support the alt-right, he did find “some of the content interesting.”
This became a small news story. Sandgren then lost his quarter-final, and, at the subsequent press conference, he read a statement condemning the media’s willingness to “turn neighbor against neighbor.” Later that day, he was surprised to receive a supportive message from Glenn Greenwald, the journalist, whom he followed on Twitter. (Sandgren also followed Roger Federer, Peter Thiel, and Paul Joseph Watson, of Infowars.)
Greenwald, a former lawyer who, in 2013, was one of the reporters for a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Guardian on Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency, is a longtime critic, from the left, of centrist and liberal policymakers and pundits. During the past two years, he has further exiled himself from the mainstream American left by responding with skepticism and disdain to reports of Russian government interference in the 2016 Presidential election. On Twitter, where he has nearly a million followers, and at the Intercept, the news Web site that he co-founded five years ago, and as a frequent guest on “Democracy Now!,” the daily progressive radio and TV broadcast, Greenwald has argued that the available evidence concerning Russian activity has indicated nothing especially untoward; he has declared that those who claim otherwise are in denial about the ineptitude of the Democrats and of Hillary Clinton, and are sometimes prone to McCarthyite hysteria. These arguments, underpinned by a distaste for banal political opinions and a profound distrust of American institutions—including the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and Rachel Maddow—have put an end to his appearances on MSNBC, where he considers himself now banned, but they have given him a place on Tucker Carlson’s show, on Fox News, and in Tennys Sandgren’s Twitter feed. Greenwald is also a tennis fan—and a regular, sweary player. He recently began working on a documentary about his adolescent fascination with Martina Navratilova.
As part of my Social Media for Journalists class in London this summer, students are required to come to the first meeting of the week with two stories charting recent developments in the social field.
This could be:
New products (e.g. the launch of IGTV )
Organization Analysis (e.g. How Vogue diversified away from Facebook by Max Willens in Digiday)
User data/insights (e.g. this piece in recode on the growth of Instagram and Snapchat)
New research (Misinformation and biases infect social media, both intentionally and accidentally by Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Indiana University and Filippo Menczer, Indiana University
Here’s my life. My husband and I get up each morning at 7 o’clock and he showers while I make coffee. By the time he’s dressed I’m already sitting at my desk writing. He kisses me goodbye then leaves for the job where he makes good money, draws excellent benefits and gets many perks, such as travel, catered lunches and full reimbursement for the gym where I attend yoga midday. His career has allowed me to work only sporadically, as a consultant, in a field I enjoy.
All that disclosure is crass, I know. I’m sorry. Because in this world where women will sit around discussing the various topiary shapes of their bikini waxes, the conversation about money (or privilege) is the one we never have. Why? I think it’s the Marie Antoinette syndrome: Those with privilege and luck don’t want the riffraff knowing the details. After all, if “those people” understood the differences in our lives, they might revolt. Or, God forbid, not see us as somehow more special, talented and/or deserving than them.
This is Hiam, a 65-year-old woman smoking a cigarette and sipping matteh, a warm herbal drink popular in Syria. It is a moment of solitude in a soul-crushing place; the bed is a prison bed. Hiam spent two and a half years in prison, most likely for the simple reason that she came from an area that rebelled against President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
The artist who drew her, Azza Abo Rebieh, was one of 30 women sharing a cell with Hiam in the Adra prison in Damascus. Then 36, Ms. Abo Rebieh was on her own surreal journey through the Syrian security system, detained because of her art and her activism.
Ms. Abo Rebieh’s artwork, from the start of Syria’s uprising in 2011, held up a mirror to a society in turmoil. Risking arrest, she painted graffiti murals about the protest movement. After security forces cracked down and some in the opposition took up arms, she helped smuggle food and medicine to people displaced by fighting.
