In 1958, Baghdad was featured in Time magazine—not as a hotbed of revolutionary, civil or sectarian strife, but for its ambitious plans for the world's most famous architects, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto, to recapture through their modern buildings the city's former glory.
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The Nuba people of southern Sudan live among a series of stone massifs west of the Blue Nile. It is said that there are ninety-nine tribes, with scores of languages between them—but they are culturally united. Nubans regard themselves as the descendants of the Nubians, the most ancient indigenous people of the region. They have been fighting the Islamist military regime in Khartoum off and on for three decades. The first war, as they call it, ended after a 2005 U.N.-brokered peace agreement, and, after a referendum, statehood for South Sudan. The Nuba were left out of the independence deal. War broke out again soon after.

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