Civilians and activists once detained by the Syrian government for joining 2011 protests against President Bashar al-Assad are again facing arbitrary detention and torture in secret jails. But this time, their captors are Syria’s hard-line militant groups. (More…)
It all started so innocently. On a Saturday afternoon at Comic-con, the cast of the popular CW Network show Supergirl was putting on a pretty standard session to recap their previous season and preview the upcoming one. (More…)
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been savage in his criticisms of the EU. “The European Union’s court, the European Court of Justice, my esteemed brothers,” Erdoğan exclaimed after an ECJ ruling in March allowing employers to ban the headscarf, “have started a Crusade against the Crescent.” (More…)
The new publication of A History of American Working-Class Literature from Cambridge University Press provides a moment to ask some questions: Is it dead? And who reads it, especially when so few people in the contemporary United States want to understand themselves as working-class? (More…)
It is now over a year since Theresa May came to power. She did come to high office on the back of an electoral victory. Nor was she even elected by Tory members. May was simply in the right place at the right time. But now she is in the wrong place at the wrong time. (More…)
We had several good agents at Radio Liberty, whose staff included many emigres from the USSR. But by far our best agent there was a man named Oleg Tumanov, who had a twisted history of involvement with the KGB that continued into the 1990s. (More…)
European policy-makers must address cultural and political anxieties about Islam and refugees head on, rather than ceding the public debate to the far right and their self-defeating policies, argues Behzad Yaghmaian. (More…)
It’s clear from the #BoycottNovara controversy that “callouts,” which have become popular in feminist and anarchist circles, need to be reexamined. Increasingly, callout culture has become synonymous with social media mobbing, boycotts, abusive e-mails, and shunning, now being aimed at Novara Media editors. (More…)
Josephine Baker was black America’s first international stage and film star. She was a woman who, tired and angry over Jim Crow racism in the United States, was early among African American artists and intellectuals in relocating to France. Baker’s career opposed and repudiated the narrow provincialism endemic to US racism. (More…)
The Internet can be a cruel place sometimes. If you’re not careful, it can be all the more brutal. The online morality police are watching your every move. And even when you are careful, it can still be pretty nasty. You enter at your own peril. (More…)
This is a portrayal of the face of Germany. It is an answer to the question: Is this Second World War a war of the “Have-nots” against the “Haves,” as Hitler asserts, of the poor peoples against the rich peoples, of the socialist nations against the plutocratic nations? (More…)
Thousands of pilots of migrant boats have been jailed in Italy. Ilaria Sesana takes a closer look at their stories and finds prosecutions that criminalize escaping migrants amid a growing campaign to change the courts’ approach to the “scafisti.” (More…)