In this open letter, a Ugandan man who has been assaulted for being gay pleads to be resettled to a safe country. As in many African countries, homosexuality has been legislated against in Uganda; in 2009, one politician even attempted to introduce the death penalty. (More…)
Spreading the American Dream is about the folklore of capitalism on a global stage. Or as an article in The National Interest once pithily described the mentality: “the multilingual, globe-trotting, advanced-degree holding, CNN-watching, Hilton Hotel-staying, international organization-employed cadres who go from trouble spot to trouble spot imposing the neoliberal state- and nation-building agenda on recalcitrant and often ungrateful natives.” (More…)
The recent ultimatum directed at the besieged city of Darayya is just one example of a larger strategy of brutal population displacement that Assad’s government will use to regain control of opposition-held Syria. (More…)
Progress has a bad name these days. There is a certain degree of justice in this. For the vast majority of human history, things were seen to be static. What would be was what had been, at least until some sort of apocalypse brought matters to a close. Progress as a historical motif gained its greatest prominence during the Enlightenment, although it was not really new then. (More…)
The notion of the gem or ore prospector occupies a certain romanticism in literature, and even historical non-fiction of gold rushes past. For American audiences, a rugged individualism is the norm, and even during the heyday of Soviet extractive resource development in Siberia, concessions were made to individual initiative to encourage the miners (the ones who weren’t forced labor, anyway). (More…)
In singling out the alt-right, Hillary Clinton has done more for rebranded extremists than any amount of tweeting or memes could ever do. ‘Do not feed the trolls’ was always a sensible adage. Yet we find Hillary can’t resist giving them a rhetorical thumping. Perhaps the Democrats have a stake in provoking right-wing abuse. (More…)
After censoring 100 of my company’s letters, what strikes one is the piquancy of style achieved by the omission of all punctuation: “The Bible says this is a land of milk and honey there is plenty of water and dust about if that’s what they mean?” or “The sentry shot an Arab one night soon after we got here I saw him soon afterwards caught him in the chest a treat it did.” (More…)
Five years on and the Syrian army and rebel fighters continue to battle for Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. We asked three experts what needs to happen for the stalemate to end. (More…)
I was three years old when father bought a charming colonial style two-storey villa on No. 14 Nahmani Street, in Tel Aviv. It had the traditional, symmetrically laid out garden. In each part of the neatly divided area, a baby palm tree spread its wide fan-shaped branches shading the oval flower bed in which it stood. (More…)
When conservative American pundits berated black gymnast Gabby Douglas for not putting her hand over her heart during the national anthem during her team’s medal ceremony at this summer’s Olympics, the subsequent furor recalled the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the meaning of patriotism was called radically into question by the counterculture and Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” answered back harshly. (More…)
The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed, and the war amongst the greedy – competition. (More…)
The Turks had, they think, 15,000 men and 32 guns. Their position was twelve miles long and most elaborately entrenched and wired with all the German devices, and rested on a marsh at either end. (More…)