From Pretoria to Peoria, the whole world is in mourning. For a one-time revolutionary leader from South Africa, that ought to say something. Not just about his political achievements, in helping end his country’s hated Apartheid regime. Rather, what Nelson Mandela’s breakthroughs meant to persons abroad, with little to no immediate stakes in his victories. (More…)
Many have noted, with amused or outraged disdain, the contortions with which right-wingers from Dick Cheney to David Cameron are seeking to appropriate a piece of the Madiba magic. Few have as yet noted its converse: icons of the modern left condemning Nelson Mandela for not being socialist enough. (More…)
Historically, scarcity has played a crucial role in metal, particularly in underground extreme metal. Until recently, there were considerable logistical barriers to recording, releasing, circulating and publicising metal recordings. It took considerable time, money and commitment to make a demo, to trade it and to market it. Copying tapes, printing flyers and hand-answering fanzine interviews required a certain degree of determination. (More…)
I hit the snooze button on my alarm clock. It’s the day of my mid-term, and I am still exhausted from filling out graduate school applications. My eyes shoot open as a massive explosion slashes through the morning air, rattling my windows, echoing across the innumerable alleyways of the Old City. (More…)
Tony Judt, who died in 2010 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, had the quality of an epigone. This is not the case because he was a historian of a stripe very much in retreat from the onslaught of post-structuralist trends since the 1970s. He was also a representative of a humanistic strain of liberalism which had, by the time of his death, long since begun to seem atavistic. (More…)
Focused on increasing the presence of people of color, transgender, queer, and female-identified people in punk and DIY in Philadelphia, First Time’s the Charm was a 16 band gig held in early November. Each group was playing their very first show, which made for a very exciting and interesting night of underground music. (More…)
“Exposure can kill as easily as a knife,” cautions the woman who introduces Katniss Everdeen and her fellow tributes to their training sessions for the Hunger Games. She is advising them to practice survival skills as well as combat techniques. But the formulation resonates throughout the first film based on Suzanne Collins’ trilogy and into the second, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (More…)
I live in what an expat friend called a “Houthi stronghold.” While Sana’a itself is a majority Sunni city, the neighborhoods surrounding its Old City have, in recent years, been flooded by a migration of Zaidi Shi’a affiliated with the al-Houthi insurgents in northern Yemen. (More…)
Metal today is in crisis. Metal’s crisis doesn’t feel like a crisis. In fact it sometimes feels like quite the reverse. This is a crisis in which most are unaware that there is a crisis – and that is the crisis. The crisis is one of abundance. (More…)
He should have been jailed long ago. By all accounts, anyone with a track record like Silvio Berlusconi had no business holding a seat in Italy’s Senate. Still, after two decades of steering the country, if not from its highest office, through the strength of his political parties, the 77-year-old Milanese billionaire was finally expelled from the legislature, on the strength of a successful criminal conviction. (More…)
According to a Pew poll released in July, the United States is only one of three surveyed nations where majorities approve of President Obama’s drone strikes. It’s joined by Israel, likely due to the popularity of its own anti-terror policies, and Kenya, where Obama’s roots continue to buoy him to popularity. Curiously, there’s a gender divide of approval in other countries, by at least double-digits. (More…)
Nadya Sadoeva owns Dimitrov. Well, the concrete bust of him anyway. The village of the same name, formerly known as Koilasar, lies in Armenia’s Ararat Province, not far from the regional centre of Artashat. I’ve visited this region of Armenia several times over the past few months in my research into the country’s Assyrian community. (More…)