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Iraq 13 years on
After a series of horrific bombings, the worst of which was in the shopping district of Karrada, people from all over Baghdad lit candles in remembrance of the victims. A heavy sadness consumed the city, but also an intense anger at the political elites.
When Prime Minister Abadi visited the site, people on the streets shouted insults and threw shoes at him. Checkpoints across the city were still using the fake bomb detectors sold to the Iraqi government by a British businessman now jailed for fraud.
The explosive-laden truck passed through several checkpoints before reaching Karrada. But it was only after the bombing that the prime minister announced that the fake detectors would be replaced with reliable technology. However, inside the Green Zone, where the political class live and work, K-9 sniffer-dog units prevent such attacks from happening.
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Arab youth: Stability over democracy
Young Arabs express the same concern over the rise of the Islamic State (IS) as young people do elsewhere, the annual Arab Youth Survey reveals. For the second year in a row, , with four in every five young people interviewed saying they were more concerned about it than other problems. Its public appeal may have also decreased slightly, findings in the survey suggest.
About 50% of the 3,500 Arab men and women questioned in the 18 to 24 year age group from 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) considered the rise of IS to be today’s biggest obstacle, an increase from last year’s 37% of people who thought it was the region’s main problem. Their other main concerns were the broader threat of terrorism, unemployment, civil unrest, and the rising cost of living. The survey was carried out in about six weeks during the first two months of this year.
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Greece: Creativity in a time of crisis
A true capital of culture, Athens is strewn with reminders of the gifts the gods left in their wake: theatre, poetry and sculpture. Yet modern Greece has faced financial ruin, crippling austerity measures and record rates of unemployment in recent years. The country is also dealing with a refugee crisis, with tens of thousands of people seeking asylum on its shores. So how do artists continue creating amid these economic and social crises? Street artist Spike 69, film director Thanos Anastopoulos and members of the Skrow Theater group tell us about making art against all odds.
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Ripping the Veil
Last fall, I walked out of a Kara Walker exhibit because the white couple beside me kept taking selfies. I’d gone to the Broad Museum in Los Angeles to see African’t, Walker’s black paper silhouettes depicting a dreamy and disturbing antebellum South. I felt jarred watching the smiling pair pose in front of horrifying images: A dismembered white explorer roasts on a spit; a plantation owner rapes an enslaved woman; a white girl fondles a black boy while another shoots air up his ass.
Later, I wondered why I’d walked away. The couple meant no harm; people take pictures in museums all the time. But I resented, or maybe envied, how easily they delighted in the spectacle of Walker’s art, while I found it hard even to look.
If images of slavery make you uncomfortable, then good luck going to the movies. Over the past decade, the entertainment industry has shown a renewed interest in telling stories about the lives of slaves. The Daily Beast declared 2013 “the year of the slavery film,” anticipating the release of 12 Years a Slave, based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 autobiography, and Belle, which followed a mixed-race aristocrat in eighteenth-century England. An interest in slavery narratives has also extended to television this past year, with Underground, a WGN America series about the Underground Railroad, and a reboot of Roots.
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Look forward in anger
WITH his gelled hair, taste for coffee and keen interest in women, Muhammad Fawzy could be a university student anywhere. At the age of 21, and studying engineering at Cairo University, he should be looking to a bright future; after all, the world is crying out for technically minded graduates. But Mr Fawzy feels the outlook is bleak. He worries that no job he finds after graduation will pay enough to cover his costs, let alone allow him to support his widowed mother. Without a good salary, Mr Fawzy cannot buy a flat; without his own home he cannot marry; and without marriage, he cannot have sex.
“I cannot have a girlfriend for religious reasons, and because I wouldn’t like that for my sister,” explains Mr Fawzy. “I was in relationships [with women] previously but it never got physical. I never held their hands or kissed them.” He often talks to women, but on Facebook: it affords privacy and safe distance. As with much else, his predicament about women is more complex than just the pull of tradition.
His views of Islam are just as tangled. He regards himself as more devout than his parents, but does not pray regularly; he prefers the company of friends to listening to preachers, yet craves a purer version of Islam. Egyptian tradition, he thinks, is tainted by a culture of bribe-paying, nepotism and other behaviour banned by religion. “We need to enforce morals that the West has taken from us.” The spread of atheism, he thinks, is a menace.
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The World According to Men
ISTANBUL—For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, women war correspondents were rare creatures—considered intellectual oddities, more likely to be fetishized than taken seriously as news gatherers.
Even as recently as 2002, Vanity Fair was delighting in the exoticism of such women in its story “Girls at the Front,” which profiled the battle-hardened correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Janine di Giovanni, and Marie Colvin. They had sex appeal and well-furnished London homes, and they made up a small brigade of female journalists jetting off to “whatever hellhole leads the news.”
These days, there are so many “girls at the front” that it’s not a story anymore. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press all have female bureau chiefs reporting on ISIS, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, and Libya. In Istanbul, a jumping-off point for covering the region, there seem to be more women freelance correspondents than men. This month’s new film Whisky Tango Foxtrot, in which Tina Fey plays an adrenaline-addicted reporter in Afghanistan, captures how women have broken into the tightly knit, elite foreign-correspondents’ club.
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Psychology of Modern Suicide Bomber
IN A SCENE FROM Norwegian journalist Paul Refsdal’s new documentary Dugma: The Button, Abu Qaswara, a would-be suicide bomber, describes the sense of exhilaration he felt during an aborted suicide attack against a Syrian army checkpoint. “These were the happiest [moments] I’ve had in 32 years. If anyone had felt exactly what I felt at that moment, Muslims would want to go through the same feeling and non-Muslims would convert just to experience it,” he enthuses to the camera, visibly elated by his attempted self-immolation.
Abu Qaswara’s attack failed after his vehicle was blocked by obstacles on the road placed by the Syrian military. But speaking shortly after he returned from his mission, it was clear that his brush with death had filled him with euphoria. “It was a feeling more than you can imagine,” he says. “Something I cannot describe, it cannot be described.”
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How technology disrupted the truth
One Monday morning last September, Britain woke to a depraved news story. The prime minister, David Cameron, had committed an “obscene act with a dead pig’s head”, according to the Daily Mail. “A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig,” the paper reported. Piers Gaveston is the name of a riotous Oxford university dining society; the authors of the story claimed their source was an MP, who said he had seen photographic evidence: “His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal.”
The story, extracted from a new biography of Cameron, sparked an immediate furore. It was gross, it was a great opportunity to humiliate an elitist prime minister, and many felt it rang true for a former member of the notorious Bullingdon Club. Within minutes, #Piggate and #Hameron were trending on Twitter, and even senior politicians joined the fun: Nicola Sturgeon said the allegations had “entertained the whole country”, while Paddy Ashdown joked that Cameron was “hogging the headlines”. At first, the BBC refused to mention the allegations, and 10 Downing Street said it would not “dignify” the story with a response – but soon it was forced to issue a denial. And so a powerful man was sexually shamed, in a way that had nothing to do with his divisive politics, and in a way he could never really respond to. But who cares? He could take it.
Then, after a full day of online merriment, something shocking happened. Isabel Oakeshott, the Daily Mail journalist who had co-written the biography with Lord Ashcroft, a billionaire businessman, went on TV and admitted that she did not know whether her huge, scandalous scoop was even true. Pressed to provide evidence for the sensational claim, Oakeshott admitted she had none.
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Post-internet Art & the New East
The internet arrived as the Eastern Bloc was collapsing, promising a future of freedom and community. Now, in the era of post-internet art, a born-digital generation of artists from the new east is on the rise. In this collection of multimedia articles, the Calvert Journal explores digital art in a region the world doesn’t get to hear enough about.
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Special Report: Chernobyl
The Chernobyl disaster rocked the work in 1986, hastening the eventual fall of the USSR. Thirty years on, the Calvert Journal explores the powerful legacy of the meltdown in art, cinema and the post-Soviet mindset.
Read this excellent multimedia series exploring new fascinating sides of the story.
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Sites automatically block extremist videos
Some of the web’s biggest destinations for watching videos have quietly started using automation to remove extremist content from their sites, according to two people familiar with the process.
The move is a major step forward for internet companies that are eager to eradicate violent propaganda from their sites and are under pressure to do so from governments around the world as attacks by extremists proliferate, from Syria to Belgium and the United States.
YouTube and Facebook are among the sites deploying systems to block or rapidly take down Islamic State videos and other similar material, the sources said.
The technology was originally developed to identify and remove copyright-protected content on video sites. It looks for “hashes,” a type of unique digital fingerprint that internet companies automatically assign to specific videos, allowing all content with matching fingerprints to be removed rapidly.
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‘I Write About Awful People’ Gay Talese
Journalist Gay Talese has never shied away from controversial topics. He took on the mafia in Honor Thy Father and dove deep into America’s sex life in Thy Neighbor’s Wife. But even Talese paused when he first heard about the Manor House Motel in Aurora Colo., back in 1980. Innkeeper Gerald Foos had outfitted his motel with a special platform which allowed him to spy on his guests — and he invited Talese to take a peek as well. Talese, a man of seemigly insatiable curiosity, did just that. But Foos demanded anonymity, so Talese decided not to write about the experience. Until now.
His new book The Voyeur’s Motel is based on Foos’ journals, and Talese is already on the defensive about it. Last week, after the Washington Post unearthed some discrepancies in Foos’s story, Talese disavowed the book — then quickly changed his mind and now says the Postwas wrong, and he stands by his story. He tells NPR’s Lynn Neary that he was very upset when the Post initially confronted him, because “for 60-some years, I’d been a reporter who took pride in getting the facts right, and I was now told I got the facts wrong.”
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How to Understand ISIS
In his best-selling History of the Arab Peoples, published two years before his death in 1993, the Anglo-Lebanese scholar Albert Hourani remarked on the surprising levels of political stability prevailing in the Arab world at that time. Despite the rapid growth of its cities, and many disparities of wealth between the governing elites and newly urbanized masses who were calling for social justice, calm seemed to rule, at least on the surface. Since the military coups of the 1950s and 1960s in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere there had been remarkably little change in the general nature of most Arab regimes or the direction of their policies. Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Jordan, Tunisia, and Morocco had seen no dynastic changes for more than two generations; in Libya and Syria the regimes that came to power around 1970 were still in place. In 2000 in Syria, nearly a decade after Hourani’s book was published, leadership passed smoothly from father to son, while in Egypt and Libya the issue of dynastic succession was being widely discussed.
Like many other observers of Middle Eastern and North African history, Hourani interpreted this picture of calm with an eye to the writings of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), the Arab historian and polymath whose theories of dynastic change and cyclical renewal and especially his concept of ‘asabiyya, variously translated as “clannism,” “group feeling,” or—in Hourani’s definition—“a corporate spirit oriented towards obtaining and keeping power,” provided a prism through which contemporary systems of governance could be viewed.
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More Liberal Islam. Death Threats Began.
For most of his adult life, Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi worked among the bearded enforcers of Saudi Arabia. He was a dedicated employee of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice – known abroad as the religious police – serving with the front-line troops protecting the Islamic kingdom from Westernization, secularism and anything but the most conservative Islamic practices.
Some of that resembled ordinary police work: busting drug dealers and bootleggers in a country that bans alcohol. But the men of “the Commission,” as Saudis call it, spent most of their time maintaining the puritanical public norms that set Saudi Arabia apart not only from the West, but from most of the Muslim world.
A key offense was ikhtilat, or unauthorized mixing between men and women. The kingdom’s clerics warn that it could lead to fornication, adultery, broken homes, children born of unmarried couples and full-blown societal collapse.
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Photos Essential To Storytelling
The question — “Pictures on the radio?” — was raised, not just by outsiders, but also by some within NPR early on, Somodevilla said, adding that Gilkey confided that he felt some colleagues were less than welcoming early on, not understanding the value of video and images. He said that was one of the biggest accomplishments of Gilkey and his NPR Visuals team colleagues (who number about a dozen people): “Making people at NPR believers in visual storytelling.”
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Michael Oreskes, NPR’s news chief, told me that when Gilkey was hired, NPR “recognized that no news organization can be only in one form of distribution. We have to be in digital, and digital now means half a dozen different things. So our roots are in radio and we are still very focused on radio, but NPR.org has 30- something million viewers every month, and that’s a visual platform. Yes, it’s true that radio is for your ear and the visuals on radio are the pictures we paint with our words. But there are lots of people who want our kind of journalism, but they want to get it in a different way.”
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Crossing Through Europe’s Firewall
We transited through five Greek islands –Rhodes, Symi, Nisyros, Kos and Kalymnos — as we sailed westward across the Aegean Sea, collecting more asylum seekers at every stop. Exhausted men and women passed out in the narrow corridors, while others hand washed their clothes, and those who could not sleep gazed at the colorful clothes hung out to dry on the deck, fluttering in unison with Greek flags.
The group which first started out with Somar, his sisters and cousins expanded over time to include Somar’s fellow village friends, and at this point we were hanging out with strangers.
We finally arrived at Piraeus port, and against the cacophony of crashing waves people congratulated one another on finally making it to Europe. They then debated the ‘service memo’ system, which was enforced to allow Balkan states to track the movement (and hence the protection) of asylum seekers as they progressed further West. But due to lack of information, the young men didn’t appreciate the initiative. Instead, they heralded serious warnings about the risks of registering early on prior to reaching one’s chosen state of asylum. Their mistrust of the Dublin Regulation led them to a fear of being held in the Balkan States against their will.
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The Future of Virtual Reality
This may come as a surprise to no one, but I never expected to be CEO of a technology company.
My unlikely journey to this point began when, as a child, I discovered my first love: music. To this day, nothing makes me feel as much as instruments and voices coming together to cast a spell, tell a story, or travel me back in time, into a memory.
Foolishly, I became a filmmaker instead of a musician. All the while, I was searching for ways to evoke in others the same depth of feeling as music gave me.
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Arab World’s Biggest Bookstore Goes Digital
On a Monday night in March, Jarir Bookstore in downtown Riyadh is bustling. Shoppers test out digital cameras and laptops, while upstairs they flip through paperbacks. At checkout, they can pick up a coloring book and the markers that go with it.
A walk around the back of the building, through unmarked doors and an elevator that smells of cigarettes, leads to corporate headquarters. From there, brothers Muhammad and Abdulkarim Alagil preside as chairman and CEO, respectively, over Jarir Marketing Company. It owns Jarir Bookstore, one of the most recognizable brands in the Gulf.
Alagil, 64, and his four younger brothers have built the company into a giant, selling Arabic and English books, office supplies, and electronics in 41 superstores in four countries, including Kuwait, Qatar, and the U.A.E. Jarir sells roughly half of Saudi Arabia’s laptops and a third of the market’s tablets.
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The Shadow Doctors
On a recent Tuesday evening in London, the surgeon David Nott attended a dinner at Bluebird, an upscale Chelsea restaurant. The room was packed with doctors, renowned specialists who had come for the annual consultants’ dinner of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, one of Britain’s leading medical establishments. As waiters set down plates of lamb and risotto, Nott checked his phone and found a series of text messages. “Hi David,” it began. “This is an urgent consultation from inside Syria.” Attached was a photograph of a man who had been shot in the throat and the stomach.
The image had been sent by a young medical worker in Aleppo. He had removed several bullets from the patient’s small intestine, but he wasn’t sure what to do about the wound in the throat. For the past hour, the man had been slowly dying on the operating table while the medical worker awaited instructions.
“Sorry, didn’t see your message till now,” Nott typed under the table. “Is the neurology ok?” It was: a bullet had pierced the trachea and the esophagus, but it hadn’t damaged the spinal cord. Nott told the medical worker to insert a plastic tube into the bullet hole, to provide an even supply of air. Then, he instructed, sew up the digestive tract with a strong suture, and, “to buttress the repair,” partly detach one of the neck muscles and use it to cover the wound.
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MidEast Writers Find Refuge in Dystopia
Basma Abdel Aziz was walking in downtown Cairo one morning when she saw a long line of people standing in front of a closed government building.
Returning hours later, Ms. Abdel Aziz, a psychiatrist who counsels torture victims, passed the same people still waiting listlessly – a young woman and an elderly man, a mother holding her baby. The building remained closed.
When she got home, she immediately started writing about the people in line and didn’t stop for 11 hours. The story became her surreal debut novel, “The Queue,” which takes place after a failed revolution in an unnamed Middle Eastern city. The narrative unfolds over 140 days, as civilians are forced to wait in an endless line to petition a shadowy authority called The Gate for basic services.
“Fiction gave me a very wide space to say what I wanted to say about totalitarian authority,” Ms. Abdel Aziz said in a recent interview.
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The Island, the Sea, the Volunteer & the Refugee
A new series in which Poets respond to stories underneath the world news headlines
As the pressure in Greece from the humanitarian refugee crisis subsides, Poet Louise Wallwein who has a long-standing relationship with the Island of Kos, travels back to Kos Town where she worked as a volunteer helping arriving refugees during the past year . In the wake of an agreement with Turkey, as the numbers of migrants crossing the sea from Bodrum to Kos falls dramatically, she travels back to find out how the humanitarian crisis played out on their doorstep has affected the Islanders and to meet the refugees who are left behind.
The trip inspired Louise to write a ballad based on what she has heard and seen.
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Diary Of A Saudi Girl
Majd Abdulghani is a young woman from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, who dreams of becoming a scientist — while her parents hope to arrange her marriage. Radio Diaries, a storytelling nonprofit and podcast, sent Abdulghani a recorder — and she ended up chronicling her world for over two years. Here are some scenes from her diary, which began on Oct. 31, 2013.
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How It Ends
The windows are open, and I’m driving my mother-in-law’s car, a turquoise compact number that’s festooned with bumper stickers like “Namaste,” “Peace,” and “Save the Tatas.” I’m free, free from my child for the first time in weeks, free from my husband, free from the little rented bungalow on the adorable street where the blue skies are almost oppressive. I’ve been back in the U.S. for exactly two weeks, and this trip away from it all, up Venice Boulevard, feels like a Carnival cruise.
I’m kind of a terrible driver. Turns out I haven’t spent much time at the wheel of a car in the past handful of years. For a long time that job went to other people: cynical, sarcastic, sometimes burly, sometimes handsome, always charming men — men I would hire by the day or the week or the month.
There was Ahmed, in Baghdad, who drove NPR’s armored Toyota pickup. He was big and round and baby-faced and soft-spoken and reasonable, with a Hitler-like mustache you would recognize if you’ve spent any time in Iraq. I want to say we were as close as siblings, but I knew that could never be true. Still, from the day I met him, my first day on the job as Baghdad bureau chief in 2010, I knew we would die for each other if we had to.
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The Outsized Life of Muhammad Ali
What a loss to suffer, even if for years you knew it was coming. Muhammad Ali, who died Friday, in Phoenix, at the age of seventy-four, was the most fantastical American figure of his era, a self-invented character of such physical wit, political defiance, global fame, and sheer originality that no novelist you might name would dare conceive him. Born Cassius Clay in Jim Crow-era Louisville, Kentucky, he was a skinny, quick-witted kid, the son of a sign painter and a house cleaner, who learned to box at the age of twelve to avenge the indignity of a stolen bicycle, a sixty-dollar red Schwinn that he could not bear to lose. Eventually, Ali became arguably the most famous person on the planet, known as a supreme athlete, an uncanny blend of power, improvisation, and velocity; a master of rhyming prediction and derision; an exemplar and symbol of racial pride; a fighter, a draft resister, an acolyte, a preacher, a separatist, an integrationist, a comedian, an actor, a dancer, a butterfly, a bee, a figure of immense courage.
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On #Tronc, Journalism, & its Value
When I was in college a couple of journo kids a few years older than me decided to start their own sports publication. They called it N2U, and earnestly explained that it meant they were “into” the “university.”
(It was the ’90s, kids. Everything sounded like this.)
When it launched, the publishers of N2U had to spend half the day on the phone translating the name of their publication for potential advertisers, writers and customers who were like, “It’s what again? You spell it how? Capital N?” They spent so much time, in fact, telling people about the name they ran out of time to tell people how to advertise in it or where to pick it up. It folded, of course, in less than a year.
Fast-forward five years, to my third newspaper. The publisher, a greasy little man nobody ever saw except at all-hands meetings, called us all together to announce that our graphics department was getting a new name. What had been just, you know, the place where advertisers and other media clients got their stuff designed was now going to be called Artworld.pss.
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