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Robert Caro, Art of Biography No. 5
Since 1976, Robert Caro has devoted himself to The Years of Lyndon Johnson, a landmark study of the thirty-sixth president of the United States. The fifth and final volume, now underway, will presumably cover the 1964 election, the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the launch of the Great Society, the deepening of America’s involvement in Vietnam, the unrest in the cities and on college campuses, Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection, and his retirement and death—enough material, it would seem, for four additional volumes. If there is a question that annoys Caro more than “Do you like Lyndon Johnson?” it is “When will the next book be published?”
This interview took place over the course of four sessions, which were conducted in his Manhattan office, near Columbus Circle. The room is spartan, containing little more than a desk, a sofa, several file cabinets, and large bookcases crammed with well-thumbed volumes on figures like FDR, Al Smith, and the Kennedy brothers—not to mention copies of Caro’s own books. One wall is dominated by the large bulletin boards where he pins his outlines, which on several occasions he politely asked me not to read. On the desk sit his Smith-Corona Electra typewriter, a few legal pads, and the room’s only ornamental touch: a lamp whose base is a statuette of a charioteer driving two rearing horses.
Caro was born in New York in 1935. He was educated at Horace Mann and Princeton; after college, he worked for a New Jersey newspaper and then Newsday. It was there that Caro first heard of Robert Moses, the urban planner who would become the subject of The Power Broker (1974), which is not so much a biography as it is a thirteen-hundred-page examination of the political forces that shaped modern-day New York City. After conceiving of the book as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Caro persisted through seven difficult years of being, in his words, “plain broke.” With the support of his wife, Ina (to make ends meet, she sold their house on Long Island without telling him), he finished, and The Power Broker won Caro his first Pulitzer. It also won him the freedom to dedicate himself to his next subject, LBJ. (For his third volume, Master of the Senate [2002], he won another Pulitzer.)
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The Factory of Fakes
The Egyptian painters who decorated King Tut’s burial chamber had to work quickly—the pharaoh died unexpectedly, at about the age of nineteen, and proper preparations had not been made. Plaster was applied to lumpy limestone walls. On the chamber’s western wall, twelve baboons with an identical design are arrayed in a grid, and various slip-ups suggest haste: one of the baboons is missing a black outline around its penis. When the entrance to the chamber was sealed, some thirty-five hundred years ago, the baboons, along with the gods and goddesses depicted in other panels, were expected to maintain their poses for eternity. This wasn’t an entirely naïve hope. Tutankhamun was interred in the Valley of the Kings, the vast network of tombs in the hills outside Luxor, four hundred miles south of Cairo. The air in the valley is bone-dry, and pigment applied to a plastered wall in a lightless, undisturbed chamber should decay little over the centuries. When the British archeologist Howard Carter unsealed the burial vault, in 1923, turning the obscure Tutankhamun into the modern icon of ancient Egypt, the yellow walls remained dazzlingly intact. The Egyptians had made only one mistake: they had closed the tomb before the paint, or Tut’s mummy, had dried, and bacteria had fed on the moisture, imposing a leopard pattern of brown dots on the yellow background. The room is known as the House of Gold.
Since then, tens of millions of tourists have crowded inside the living-room-size chamber, exuding a swampy mist of breath and sweat, which has caused the plaster to expand and contract. Bahaa AbdelGaber, an Egyptian antiquities official, told me recently that the temperature inside the Luxor tombs sometimes exceeds a hundred and twenty degrees. “Oh, the smell on a busy day!” he said.
In 2009, a team of conservators from the Getty Conservation Institute, in California, visited Tut’s tomb and determined that some painted areas had become dangerously loosened. The conservators cleaned portions of the walls and applied adhesives to flaking paint, in an effort to forestall pictorial losses. Reversibility is a prime rule of modern conservation, and, according to the latest scholarly thinking, these physical interventions were safe.
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Lost and Found
The wind is what struck Dim Niang in those first days—a constant dry wind that knew no boundaries, wind that could lift a stretch of road dust and seem to cast it up to Oklahoma, New Mexico, and beyond. Back home in Myanmar, the tropical humidity would have pounded dirt like this into submission. How different Amarillo was. Paved roads that did not buckle under monsoons. Grocery stores built like giant boxes. Big trucks with cowboys for drivers.
Dim was more curious about Amarillo than she was intimidated by it. A slim beauty, the second oldest of six in a family that had farmed rice and cotton in Kalaymyo, a remote village on the southern edge of Chin State, she’d always been resilient. This was a quality of her people, the Zomi, a tight-knit ethnic group in the lush, green mountains that border India and Bangladesh. After moving from western China as late as the eighth century, the Zomi had staked out an existence in the isolated mountains, preserving their dialects and ceremonial dress even after adopting Christianity when American missionaries arrived, in the late 1800s. Dim had studied hard in school and eventually graduated from a local Bible college, an achievement that shaped her conditions for a suitor: he had to be Zomi, he had to be educated, and he had to be kind.
Zam Kap was aware of these criteria. A bold young man from the same village, he had met Dim’s family as a teenager, and as he and Dim reached their mid-twenties, he began to court her openly, announcing to everyone in the neighborhood that he loved her. He was a handsome college graduate with a degree in psychology and a fondness for story who showed promise as a community leader, and his enthusiasm seemed boundless. Standing before Dim, he’d stretch his arms wide, flash a contagious smile, and say, “I love you. Do you love me?”—a candor that made a shy but flattered Dim laugh. She dropped enough hints with her family about her admiration for him that when Zam’s father approached hers about a wedding, the ceremony took place within a week.
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Denton, Thiel, & Plot to Murder Gawker
One day in September 2014 the publisher of Gawker Media, Nick Denton, sent an e-mail to Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and billionaire. It could easily have been a message to a friend, or at least a kindred spirit, for, as many people who know them both have noted, the two have so much in common.
They are contemporaries: Denton turned 50 this past August, and Thiel 49 two months later. Both were born in Europe—Denton in England and Thiel in Germany. Both graduated from fancy universities—Denton from Oxford and Thiel from Stanford. Both made their fortunes in the digital world; in fact, it had brought them together in San Francisco a dozen or so years earlier. Both are gay, and both came out relatively late. Both are libertarians, and nonconformists, and visionaries, and science-fiction fans, and workaholics, and wonks. Both have resisted getting old, Denton by attitude, Thiel through human growth hormones. Both have a cultish kind of appeal. Both were wealthy still in 2014, though as winner of one of Silicon Valley’s greatest daily doubles—he co-founded PayPal and was Facebook’s first big investor—Thiel was exponentially more so, a fact that stuck in the ultra-competitive Denton’s craw. “Nauseatingly successful” was how Denton once described him. “Does Nick Denton wish he were Peter Thiel?” a headline on Denton’s own gawker.com once asked.
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Leonard Cohen makes it darker
When Leonard Cohen was twenty-five, he was living in London, sitting in cold rooms writing sad poems. He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was 1960, long before he played the festival at the Isle of Wight in front of six hundred thousand people. In those days, he was a Jamesian Jew, the provincial abroad, a refugee from the Montreal literary scene. Cohen, whose family was both prominent and cultivated, had an ironical view of himself. He was a bohemian with a cushion whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry. Even before he had much of an audience, he had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted. In a letter to his publisher, he said that he was out to reach “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists.”
Cohen was growing weary of London’s rising damp and its gray skies. An English dentist had just yanked one of his wisdom teeth. After weeks of cold and rain, he wandered into a bank and asked the teller about his deep suntan. The teller said that he had just returned from a trip to Greece. Cohen bought an airline ticket.
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Trump’s warm welcome in Mideast
Arab autocrats are gleeful. Islamic extremists seem ecstatic. Israel’s right-wing government is exuberant. Only Iran seems nervous about the election of Donald Trump, who has vowed to transform U.S. policy in a region with four wars (in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen), rising extremism, the return of authoritarian rule after the collapse of the Arab Spring, economic instability, and demographic challenges transforming almost two dozen societies.
The first world leader to telephone Trump after his victory was Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a former field marshal who orchestrated a military coup, in 2013, against a democratically elected President from the Muslim Brotherhood. Sisi then ran for the office himself a year later. Thousands were killed during the bloody transition, and more than fifty thousand have since been imprisoned in “one of the widest arrest campaigns in the country’s modern history, targeting a broad spectrum of political opponents,” Human Rights Watch reported this fall. In September, Sisi met with both Trump and Hillary Clinton in New York during the United Nations General Assembly. The candidates’ positions on Egypt—the Arab world’s most populous country, with more than ninety million people—reflected their widely divergent foreign policies. During a primary debate with Bernie Sanders, Clinton charged that Egypt had become “an army dictatorship.” Trump, after his meeting with Sisi, called him “a fantastic guy” and commended their “good chemistry.”
With an apparent touch of envy, Trump added, “He took control of Egypt. And he really took control of it.”
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9th Arab investigative journalism forum
The 9th annual forum for Arab Investigative journalists will open in Jordan’s Dead Sea next month, bringing together over 25 panels and workshops on topics such as personal safety of reporters in conflict, to cross-border investigations and telling stories on multiple platforms.
The forum, held under the theme “ARIJ: a decade of investigating the Arab world; seeing, hearing, exposing”, coincides with the network’s 10th anniversary. More than 320 Arab and international investigative editors, journalists, trainers, academics and media students will attend the December 1-3, 2016 event, the eighth in Jordan since the creation of the Amman-based Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) in 2005.
Veteran journalist Walter “Robby” Robinson will be the keynote speaker. He led the Boston Globe Spotlight team’s Pulitzer Prize winning investigation into the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal and now is the newspaper’s editor at large.
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Who murdered Giulio Regeni?
When six senior Italian detectives arrived in Cairo in early February, following the discovery of the brutally battered body of 28-year-old Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni, they faced long odds of solving the mystery of his disappearance and death. Egyptian officials had told reporters that Regeni had probably been hit by a car, but clear signs of torture on his body had raised an alarm in Rome.
The Egyptian authorities guaranteed “full cooperation”, but this was quickly revealed to be a hollow promise. The Italians were allowed to question witnesses – but only for a few minutes, after the Egyptian police had finished their own much longer interrogations, and with the Egyptian police still in the room. The Italians requested the video footage from the metro station where Regeni last used his mobile phone, but the Egyptians allowed several days to elapse, by which time the footage from the day of his disappearance had been taped over. They also refused to share the mobile phone records from the area around Regeni’s home, where he disappeared on 25 January, and the site where his body was found nine days later.
One of the Egyptian chief investigators in charge of the Regeni case, Major General Khaled Shalaby, who told the press that there were no signs of foul play, is a controversial figure. Convicted of kidnapping and torture over a decade ago, he escaped with a suspended sentence.
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The Pieces of Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is there and not there. In the streaming image on my laptop she sits at a desk, backlit in her book-lined office, her right hand holding a goblet filled with liquid of such a dark crimson that it seems to suck all the other colors from the room. In the dim light Zadie’s face looks pale, the scatter of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose shifting around as if in no fixed position.
Circumstances have forced us to talk via FaceTime. It’s after midnight in London, where Zadie is; dark too where I am, in the attic of my house in Princeton, N. J. Despite the 3,000 miles of ocean that separate us, the illusion is that we are facing each other across our individual writing desks.
I don’t like FaceTime. The sudden projection into my presence of a staring, homuncular creature always feels strong and violent. It makes me anxious to have to talk to someone like this and pretend they’re real.
There’s another reason for my hesitancy to credit what I’m seeing tonight. I’ve just finished Zadie’s new novel, “Swing Time,” and am still living in its shadow world. Like the black-and-white musicals that feature in its pages, the book is a play of light and dark – at once an assertion of physicality and an illusion – in which the main characters, a girl born to a black mother and a while father, tries to assemble, from the competing allegiances that claim her, an identity that allows her to join the dance. This narrator is unnamed, as is the African country where much of the action takes place. The novel cloaks existential dread beneath the brightest of intensities.
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The Siege Starts Without Warning
I woke up one morning 24 years ago to find a war all around me. The night before I had been at a concert for the Partybreakers, a punk band from Belgrade. I’d had too much beer and I had a headache. Bursts of gunfire were audible, along with the explosions of the mortar shells that would rain down on Sarajevo for the next three and a half years.
I don’t know what it was like when the war first came to Aleppo, Syria. Only the people still living there do – thousands of men, women and children who have now been under siege for years. From the perspective of an ordinary citizen, let’s say a 25 year old with literary and musical interests, the siege starts without warning and comes out of nowhere.
Yes, the papers and the TV have been reporting for months about how the situation in the country is growing more complicated, how conflict is brewing among political opponents, and how in the provinces there has already been fighting. But as long as a city continues to live its normal, placid life, which is the sort of life it lives up until the very last instant and the final quiet evening, war seems impossible. You look at your dog and your books, the spider in the corner of your room spinning a web that tomorrow will catch its first little fly, and you can’t imagine that the next morning all this, including the dog and the spider, will be caught up in war.
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Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria
In part because my father was murdered by an Arab, I’ve made an effort to understand the impact of U.S. policy in the Mideast and particularly the factors that sometimes motivate bloodthirsty responses from the Islamic world against our country. As we focus on the rise of the Islamic State and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology. Instead we should examine the more complex rationales of history and oil — and how they often point the finger of blame back at our own shores.
America’s unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria — little-known to the American people yet well-known to Syrians — sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIL. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely only to compound the crisis. Secretary of State John Kerry this week announced a “provisional” ceasefire in Syria. But since U.S. leverage and prestige within Syria is minimal — and the ceasefire doesn’t include key combatants such as Islamic State and al Nusra — it’s bound to be a shaky truce at best. Similarly President Obama’s stepped-up military intervention in Libya — U.S. airstrikes targeted an Islamic State training camp last week — is likely to strengthen rather than weaken the radicals. As the New York Times reported in a December 8, 2015, front-page story, Islamic State political leaders and strategic planners are working to provoke an American military intervention. They know from experience this will flood their ranks with volunteer fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world against America.
To understand this dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians’ perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.
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Social Media into the Minds of ISIS
Rukmini Callimachi is arguably the best reporter on the most important beat in the world. As a New York Times correspondent covering terrorism, her work explores not just what jihadists do but how they do it. You’ve read her stories on ISIS’s use of birth control to maintain its supply of sex slaves, or the Kouachi brothers’ path to the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, or the nature of lone-wolf attacks like the recent mass shooting in Orlando. Her byline often appears on the front page of the paper; at just 43, she’s received three Pulitzer Prize nominations. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Callimachi, though, is how she gets her insights into the world’s most hostile and secretive organizations. Sure, she spends months every year out of the country reporting, but increasingly her work requires just as much time staring at her phone and computer screen. Social media enables Callimachi to access what she calls the “inner world of jihadists”; she lurks in Telegram chat rooms, navigates an endless flood of tips on Twitter, and carefully tracks sources and subjects all over the Internet. Her cell phone battery dies up to four times a day. The truth, she has found, is as much online as it is on the ground.
WIRED: How did you start covering terrorism?
CALLIMACHI: In December 2006, I became the West Africa correspondent for the Associated Press. As it happened, that was the year that a group there pledged allegiance to al Qaeda and became their North African branch. Very quickly, large swaths of their area were deemed too dangerous for a Westerner to visit, and I saw my own world shrink as a result.
Then in 2012 they succeeded in taking over northern Mali. The area that they controlled with two other groups was enormous, the size of Afghanistan. They imposed Sharia law, cut off people’s hands. An adulterous couple was stoned to death, and women had to be veiled. It was one of the biggest stories on my beat, but it was frustrating because I couldn’t go there, so I was covering it by phone. Then in 2013 the French went in to push back the jihadis, and suddenly reporters were able to go in behind them.
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Riad Sattouf: Why he hates nationalism
In spring 2011, when pro-democracy protests in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria were met with the crushing violence that would shape five years of conflict, a young French cartoonist in Paris decided to help some of his Syrian relatives get out.
At the time, Riad Sattouf was well known as a big talent on France’s thriving comics scene, drawing funny and scathing works of social observation. He had branched into cinema, winning the French equivalent of a Bafta for his first film The French Kissers, a nerdy take on teenage angst. From his comfortable life in Paris, Sattouf was convinced that Syria was going to be “completely destroyed”, so he went through official French state channels to apply for visas for some of his family members.
It proved so maddeningly difficult that he felt he had to write about it. But to write about it, Sattouf knew he would have tell his life story, which he had kept carefully shut away: his childhood growing up in Libya and Syria with a Syrian father and French mother, his parents’ divorce, his teenage years in Brittany.
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Female photographers on deadliest front lines
Sprinting for her life as the Taliban sprayed bullets at her in open ground, Alison Baskerville had to rely on the covering fire of British soldiers to ensure she didn’t die in Afghanistan.
Caught in an ambush, she was forced to dive for cover, only pausing when coalition air support arrived to scare the enemy away.
But Baskerville is not a soldier. She is one of a growing number of female photographers putting themselves on the front line of conflicts across the world, to capture at times what their male counterparts can’t.
‘From the streets of Paris to the outposts of Iraq, women are now fighting along side men and now photographing alongside them also,’ the 41-year-old respected war photographer and former sergeant in the RAF told MailOnline.
‘Times are changing, and some of the women I have seen in this industry are brave and confident. They put themselves in danger and challenge the stereotype of women and war.’
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The Coming Crisis in Mosul
A humanitarian catastrophe is looming over northern Iraq. As many as a million people are expected to stream out of Mosul when Iraqi government forces, backed by the United States, move to retake the city from isis, which took control two years ago. The much anticipated military operation could begin as early as next month, but aid workers here say they do not have anywhere near the resources, money, or manpower to deal with the expected human tide.
“It’s a nightmare—a disaster heading our way,’’ Alex Milutinovic, the director of the International Rescue Committee in Erbil, told me. “The Iraqi government is determined to destroy ISIS, but it is impossible to accommodate the number of refugees the military operation is going to produce.”
The Iraqi and American governments have been planning to retake Mosul since isis invaded the country and captured the city, in 2014. The reasons for doing so are obvious and urgent: the people of Mosul are being held hostage by violent fanatics; last month, according to the Iraq Oil Report, which has correspondents inside the city, ISIS agents arrested ninety people on charges of spying for the Iraqi government and executed sixty of them.
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The World Is a Thriving Slaughterhouse
Here, lying in a stained carton, are notes on a refugee camp in Tanzania, where surviving Tutsis and their Hutu enemies lived side by side in blue tarp tents. It is 1994. The notes record that there are people everywhere, milling and moving in short parades on the main path in the camp, hastily constructed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Women wear colorful cloths, khangas, and carry yellow plastic containers of water on their heads. Children and old men push up against one another, as if at a bargain sale. They hold portable radios to their ears. A man in a brown rain hat drags a reluctant goat by a rope. White smoke mixes with the smells of fresh earth and excrement. At an outdoor butcher shop, a cow’s bloodied horn lies beside the animal’s astonished head. I greet a group of young Hutus in French. “Did you participate in the killings?,” I ask. “We did nothing,” one says. “Did you see others do the killing?” He says, “We saw nothing.” I ask, “How many Tutsis are left in Rwanda, do you think?” A teenage boy wearing a green baseball cap grins, and slowly draws the side of his index finger across his throat.
Here are several photos of and notes on Divis Flats, a Catholic neighborhood, or stronghold, in Belfast. It is 1981. Coiled barbed wire runs atop a long gray wall on which is written smash h-block, a reference to the British prison in which members of the Irish Republican Army are held. Windows are pockmarked with bullet holes and display black flags of mourning for hunger strikers. Rats skitter in huge sewage pits, soggy with rain. Glass chips cover streets that are interrupted by “dragon’s teeth,” huge blocks of stone set out by the British army in uneven rows to prevent fast getaways. The presence of a stranger in the area is scrutinized, my every step tracked by a huddle of teenage boys with grim, bold faces, loitering beside a fire-blackened car. It is essential not to look British. The week before my arrival, a CBS reporter was stabbed at this same spot because he made the mistake of wearing a Burberry coat.
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Egypt: App to combat forced disappearances
For Egyptians, the risk of being snatched from the street and forcibly disappeared by the country’s security forces has never been greater. In the first eight months of 2015, 1,250 people disappeared, according to a report by the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF).
In response, the organisation has created I Protect, an app that allows Android phone users to key in a code when they are being detained, which sends three text messages to contacts and an email containing the location of their arrest to the ECRF.
The group hopes the messages will aid a quick reaction during the first 24 hours of an arrest, key to stopping people being transferred from a police station to a larger facility, making them harder to find.
Mohammed Lotfy, executive director of ECRF, said: “Being able to speak out about the arrest of an activist or protestor in the first hours contributes to the person’s transfer from police to prosecution during the legal time from of 24 hours.
“This prevents their detention incommunicado, or worse their forced disappearance, and therefore reduces the risks of being subjected to torture or other ill treatment.”
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The many lives of John le Carré
If you’re ever lucky enough to score an early success as a writer, as happened to me with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, for the rest of your life there’s a before-the-fall and an after-the-fall. You look back at the books you wrote before the searchlight picked you out and they read like the books of your innocence; and the books after it, in your low moments, like the strivings of a man on trial. ‘Trying too hard’ the critics cry. I never thought I was trying too hard. I reckoned I owed it to my success to get the best out of myself, and by and large, however good or bad the best was, that was what I did.
And I love writing. I love doing what I’m doing at this moment, scribbling away like a man in hiding at a poky desk on a blackclouded early morning in May, with the mountain rain scuttling down the window and no excuse for tramping down to the railway station under an umbrella because the International New York Times doesn’t arrive until lunchtime.
I love writing on the hoof, in notebooks on walks, in trains and cafés, then scurrying home to pick over my booty. When I am in Hampstead there is a bench I favour on the Heath, tucked under a spreading tree and set apart from its companions, and that’s where I like to scribble. I have only ever written by hand. Arrogantly perhaps, I prefer to remain with the centuries-old tradition of unmechanized writing. The lapsed graphic artist in me actually enjoys drawing the words.
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IS Terror ‘All Over the World’
New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi is known for her in-depth reporting on terrorism and the Islamic State. Her recent jailhouse interview with Harry Sarfo, a German citizen who joined ISIS and trained in Syria before disavowing the group, revealed the organization’s particular interest in recruits from Europe. “[Harry] was very much a desirable target for them, given his German passport and his experience living in London — two countries that they’re still trying to infiltrate,” Callimachi tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.
In addition to her on-the-ground reporting, Callimachi follows ISIS’ encrypted social media channels and communicates through social media with people connected to the terror group. She says that the group’s recruiting efforts are widespread and focus on both the “mentally unwell” and those who have been “radicalized since birth.”
Callimachi says the individual motivations of the recruits don’t really matter as long as they contribute to the Islamic State’s primary objective. “The purpose of this group is to spread terror, to spread it all over the world, to make the kaffir, the infidel — which is us — feel as if they’re not safe anywhere,” she says. “That’s their end goal.”
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‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’
Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.
In 2003 and early 2004, I wrote a book to make the case for hope. Hope in the Dark was, in many ways, of its moment – it was written against the tremendous despair at the height of the Bush administration’s powers and the outset of the war in Iraq. That moment passed long ago, but despair, defeatism, cynicism and the amnesia and assumptions from which they often arise have not dispersed, even as the most wildly, unimaginably magnificent things came to pass. There is a lot of evidence for the defence.
Coming back to the text more than a dozen tumultuous years later, I believe its premises hold up. Progressive, populist and grassroots constituencies have had many victories. Popular power has continued to be a profound force for change. And the changes we have undergone, both wonderful and terrible, are astonishing.
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360° Reality of World’s Most Vulnerable
Four boats approach the small harbor of Skala on the Greek island of Lesbos. The first vessel is occupied by agents of Frontex, the European Union border-control unit. The men are dressed in black, from helmets to combat boots. They tow the second boat, an inflatable dinghy with flimsy plywood baseboards that’s crammed from pontoon to pontoon with extremely cold people. Earlier this morning a smuggler in Izmir, Turkey, filled the raft with refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, handed the throttle to a young man who’d never driven a boat, and pointed toward Greece. Like so many of the thousands of vessels provided by human-smuggling mafias, this one didn’t have enough fuel and ran out of gas somewhere in the middle of the Aegean.
The third boat, a gray Zodiac, found them. It’s manned by two young men—one an out-of-work Greek, the other a Norwegian bored with his stultifying Oslo desk job. Neither of them possesses an organizational affiliation. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers have come through Lesbos in the past year, as of my visit on December 18, neither Frontex nor the Greek coast guard has established much of a presence. Instead, the job of offering aid falls largely to international volunteers who have flocked to the island. A throng of them, their experience ranging from extensive to none, waits onshore with reflective survival blankets. The emergencies director of Human Rights Watch is here, as is a fashion model from Manhattan who brought perfume samples for the refugees. As the Zodiac approaches the dock, the Norwegian hurls himself into the water and ties the boat up to a mooring.
Behind the scene trails the fourth boat, a wooden vessel owned by a local fisherman. On the bow, a bearded American named David Darg holds up a small virtual-reality camera called a Ricoh Theta. Thirty-seven years old, with a reddish-brown beard, tight black jeans, and the thick build of a logger, Darg occupies a unique and peculiar role within the fast-moving world of new media.1 On the one hand he’s a crisis responder and vice president of international operations at Operation Blessing, a faith-based nonprofit. But he’s also cofounder of Ryot, a Los Angeles for-profit company that specializes in hopeful video content from developing and disaster-affected nations. He has come to Lesbos to bring the reality of the migrant crisis to the wider world. Darg calls the VR camera in his hand a “transportation device,” one capable of essentially bringing Western viewers to the world’s strife-ridden places. “You register VR as an experience you had,” he says, “rather than something you see”—a common boast about VR.
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Why Europe Can’t Find Jihadis In Its Midst
The assignment given to the Belgian police in the summer of 2014 was straightforward but high stakes: Follow two men suspected of involvement with ISIS through the streets of Brussels. Find out who they meet, record what they say. A court had approved wiretaps for the men’s phones and for the use of tracking devices, and a specialized team of covert operators from the secret service had broken into the men’s homes and vehicles and planted bugs and GPS devices without leaving a trace.
Rather unusually, there had been little problem getting senior police officials and the courts that oversee Belgium’s personal privacy laws to approve the mission. Partly, it was the two men’s history: They had long criminal records — drug dealing, petty theft, and the occasional violent robbery — and now, unbeknownst to them, had been placed on a terrorism watch list.
With hundreds of people suspected of having ties to ISIS and al-Qaeda, it would be impossible for the Belgian authorities to monitor all of them. But these two were believed to be linked to Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French-Algerian man charged with killing four people at the Jewish Museum of Brussels on May 24, 2014.
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Marjorie Liu: How Rejection Shaped Her Writing
San Diego Comic-Con is over. Nerds from all around the world have packed up their costumes, wiped off their makeup and left the city. Many of them will bring home more than just collectibles and photos. They’ll also bring back memories of meeting their favorite artists and writers.
Marjorie Liu is one of those writers; she wrote the epic fantasy comic book Monstress with Japanese artist, Sana Takeda. Throughout the weekend, fans flocked to their booth to meet Liu and have her sign their copies of the book.
“Thank you guys so much for making this book,” 26-year-old Jessica Wooden said as she approached the table, “It’s eye-opening,” she laughed, “and it’s just great.” Liu looked up and smiled. “That means the world to us. Thank you so much,” she said, handing the book back to Wooden.
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Syria’s Secret Library
Away from the sound of bombs and bullets, in the basement of a crumbling house in the besieged Syrian town of Darayya, is a secret library. It’s home to thousands of books rescued from bombed-out buildings by local volunteers, who daily brave snipers and shells to fill it’s shelves. In a town gripped by hunger and death after three years without food aid, Mike Thomson reveals how this literary sanctuary is proving a lifeline to a community shattered by war. Produced by Michael Gallagher and translated by
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How Stories Deceive
On the afternoon of October 10, 2013, an unusually cold day, the streets of downtown Dublin were filled with tourists and people leaving work early. In their midst, one young woman stood out. She seemed dazed and distressed as she wandered down O’Connell Street, looking around timidly, a helpless-seeming terror in her eyes. She stopped in front of the post office, or, as locals would have it, the G.P.O. Standing between the thick columns, she looked even more forlorn. She was dressed in a purple hoodie under a gray wool sweater; tight, darkly colored jeans; and flat, black shoes. Her face was ashen. She was shivering. A passerby, stunned by her appearance, asked if she needed help. She looked at him mutely, as if not quite grasping the essence of the question. Somebody called the police. An officer from the Store Street garda station answered the call. He took her to a hospital. It seemed the best thing to do.
She was a teen-ager—fourteen or fifteen, at most. At five feet six, she weighed just more than eighty-eight pounds. Her long, blond hair covered a spiny, battered back. Once she did talk, some days later, it became clear that she had only the most rudimentary grasp of English—not enough to say who she was or why she’d appeared as she had. But the girl could draw. And what she drew made her new guardians catch their breaths. One stifled a gasp. One burst out crying. There she was, a small stick-like figure, being flown to Ireland on a plane. And there she was again, lying on a bed, surrounded by multiple men. She seemed to be a victim of human trafficking—one of the lucky ones who had somehow managed to escape.
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