Michael Shaikh, author of The Last Sweet Bite, on how food is weaponized in conflict zones to starve bodies and cultures, as erasure becomes policy and preservation a form of resistance.
“It had been during one of those quiet and ambling days that I fell back in touch with an old favourite teacher of mine who had disappeared from our school in the winter of my final year under mysterious and unexplained circumstances.”
The cofounder of permaculture on why the radical idea he developed in the 1970s is key to fighting climate change today.
The social justice comedian on her embarrassing patriotism, bringing public policy to the stage, and making white people laugh.
What would he do for her? He would give her his full attention, tend to her large shape, love her the way she still loved him, as he had first appeared to her.
I wasn’t allowed to enter Grace’s room when she was not at home, so I had to make haste.
In Norway’s far north, members of Europe’s last intact nomadic culture struggle to adjust as development and climate change reshape the landscape and their future.
A photographer crosses state lines and ideological borders to talk to voters on the eve of America's presidential election.
The writer on America’s fear culture, bookstores as community builders, and why writers should care about their character more than their characters.
The writer on the lives of cosmopolitan migrants, Latin American fiction, and the therapeutic limitations of testimony.
Billed as an aberration, Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric is anything but.
“I want both: marriage and lovers, freedom and security. I want my husband to say yes to this.”
The Girl on Girl art collective’s pink feminist newsstand.
The New York Film Festival presents Errol Morris on Elsa Dorfman and Petra Epperlein with Michael Tucker on the Stasi files.
The director on what happens when Native American tradition collides with urban gang culture.
They held hands. They put their feet in the water. I love him, Corey told herself.
On Music: The musician on Led Zeppelin, Tinariwen, and his rejection of the “world music” label.
The Met Breuer unveils a trove of the photographer’s early work.
In a war that remains unfinished, two Syrian-British writers acknowledge and affirm those whose stories and lives may be lost in its course.
The author on accessibility, black desire, and holding space for complex histories.
On the value of uncertainty—in college essays and American politics.
How fenceline communities are gathering clues to help them combat environmental pollution.
A daughter shares her father's first responder story about searching for bodies at Ground Zero.
Farhad Mirza interviews Shahbaz Taseer about his experience as a captive between two battlefronts, and how his faith gave him the hope he needed to survive.
Sara Elkamel interviews Aya Aziz about Islam, sexuality, and the dimensions of the self.
The writer and performance artist on how queer people of color birth themselves anew, protest politics in Canada, and the poetic beauty of complicated relationships.
On Music: Hitching a Ride with the Guatemalan Chicken Bus Gypsy Caravan.
A writer accompanies her grandmother on a journey through sites of Holocaust remembrance.
The crisis of academic publishing and the uncertain future of the humanities.
Reading the OJ Simpson trial through a novelistic lens.
Karthika Nair’s new book brings a new narrative to an old tale
Shakespeare warned against treating democracy as a popularity contest.
Jose Orduna on asserting personhood as resistance, the connection between activism and essays, and being 'aggressively bilingual'
Hilary Leichter speaks with Annie DeWitt about the consequences of observation, the brutality of becoming, and Bob Ross's Happy Trees.
What do you do with your artistic legacy when the world no longer loves it?
An interview with Adam Z. Levy and Ashley Nelson Levy, the founders of Transit Books on the power of literary translation to bridge cultural divides.
An unplanned New York City wedding left to theatrical chance by the Dzieci Theatre Company goes off with all the hitches.
For months, refugees caught in a "humanitarian logjam" near the Greek/Macedonian border lived in a makeshift tent city—until Greek officials cleared the area, replacing the fact of the camp with yet another layer of uncertainty.
Mircea Eliade's 1924 classic is now available in English translation, offering a rare glimpse into the often unseen Romania.
Even as Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka gets back to normalcy after a deadly siege a month ago, Bangladesh wrestles with the rising specter of extremism.
The Festival Videobrasil founder discusses Brazil’s political history with video art and her vision for the nonprofit’s pioneering new art space.
Focusing on the living at the Galicia Jewish Museum and the Jewish Community Centre in Krakow, Poland
An exhibition in Beirut challenges conventional perspectives to tell a political history of Palestinian embroidery
A charming mini-gallery contains pictographs that break down the etymology of Icelandic words for interested followers.
Maybe it’s only the rugged individuals divided up good and bad, vigilante and thug, shooter or shot, dead or alive.
On Music:How an ancient dance form, performed live, connects many worlds.
Erica Wright talks to translator André Naffis-Sahely about translating one of Morocco's greatest living poets and the 'commodity' of despair.
The Math Artist speaks about his multi-media project involving the Confederate flag.
NIMBYism, racial fear, and class politics: the struggles of trying to connect the divided Los Angeles.
The same jerks after your uterus are shooting down campaign rules; one tactic just backfired.
How Kurdish rights continue to flounder under an authoritarian Turkey and an imploding Syria.
A teenage girl refuses to give into the fear created by recent terrorist attacks in France.
A urbanista fala sobre o que as favelas do Rio podem ensinar às cidades globais, quando comunidades se tornam marcas, e o valor da informalidade.
Pieter Hugo's latest portrait series examines the quiet afterlives of apartheid and genocide.
On Music: The perfect song to sing in times of uprising, at Occupy Wall Street, or before a Seder dinner—and always en masse.
Kyle Lucia Wu interviews Jade Sharma about her new book and its focus on addition, prostitution, and the power of honesty and humor.
Discretionary policy on immigration has largely operated behind closed doors,something experts have long questioned.
At daybreak, a bird flew into our bedroom, smacked the wall mirror, and fell on Darla’s back. She slept on.
You are not going out, he said. You haven’t been out for weeks. People have been in touch with you, he said. Why don’t you see them?
Exploring American gun culture and the thin line between fact and fiction.
Kelly Lydick speaks with Anthony Michael Morena about hybrid writing and the Voyager space mission as art.
The poet discusses the fallouts of writing a memoir, making her way back to poetry, and the loss of David Bowie.
Ed Winstead talks to artist José Parlá about his new short film and finding unity through art.
Negotiating our diversity in a world that so often defaults to skin color.
The consequences of undermining mental health needs for the ‘war on terror.’
The unexpected hubbub surrounding Sandro Miller's homage to classic photographs.
When the circus is in town and a monkey's kiss means a prize.
On Music: An interview compilation with Sean Yseult, cofounder of White Zombie.
An Immigrant father-to-be ponders what homeland means to him, and what it might mean to his daughter.
How the military, adobe houses, and finger-sized solar panels can pave the way to a more democratic distribution of energy.
Fear of homosexuality leaves both gay and straight kids vulnerable.
The acclaimed Mexican writer explains why Donald Trump is a welcome distraction for the government of Mexico.
Edith Wharton and the Kardashian clan might have more in common than meets the eye.
The Future of Cities: If the reason Haiti suffers is just bad luck, some voodoo curse, then maybe we bear no responsibility, maybe we can confine it to some distant dimension.
The Future of Cities: The Chicago-based urban design team on rebuilding neighborhoods, gentrification, and the “magic” of Theaster Gates.
The Future of Cities: In the aftermath of the most recent attacks in Paris, the writer considers a city wavering between gravity and light.
The Future of Cities: The city planner on what Rio’s favelas can teach global cities, when communities become brands, and the value of informality.
While neighborhoods are being redeveloped, their histories are being used to advertise their future. History has become a marketing tool. Make use of the past and create the future with it: this is familiar for a country whose national ideology is built on an endless cycle of self-invention.
The future of Beijing? That depends on the many currents running through the political seas of the country, and the world around it. Will it be the capital of the last communist country on earth? Will it be the capital of the wealthiest capitalist economy? Will some semblance of its former beauty return?
On the crowded bus there was an Iraqi woman who was utterly lost; she did not know where her hotel was. With their broken Arabic, the other riders managed to figure out where she was staying and told the driver. The driver, in turn, halted the bus right in front of the Iraqi woman’s hotel— the hotel of a woman from a country Iran had fought a bloody eight-year war with.
Cape Town is blessed in the beauty pageant of luxury tourism. Hotels, swimming pools, golf courses, and gated playgrounds proliferate to pamper the wealthy. No bounty from the seductions of one of the world’s most vibrant, pluralistic cities is shared with the low-waged who make this wealth.
When I go back to Bogotá, I like to share my knowledge of the car bombs that went off in the city in the ’80s and ’90s. I helpfully point out the gory details to cab drivers and friends. I press my finger on the window and point at corners, “That’s the spot where an ATM blew up, seven dead.”
It is already becoming clear that the efficacy of the old imperial strategy of “divide and rule”—caste against caste, religion against religion, temporary worker against permanent—is running out. The ability of India’s rural poor to endure cruelty is admittedly stupendous, but it is not, as their industrial overlords fondly believed, infinite.
The hospital is gone, another going, our clinic is gone, our local supermarket gone and another about to leave; a church, its school and active playground, are gone. Once people could live near where they worked, but now they can’t afford to and, in any case, where they worked no longer exists.
The hyper-diversification of narco-capitalism will produce fantastic dealers, who, for interested parties, will offer tanks of oxygen, water for human consumption, and substandard drugs, the kind whose memory lives on for days in the form of jaw pain and bloodshot eyes.
During the difficult times that the bleeding Middle East as a whole and Israel in particular are enduring, times of religious fundamentalism, violence, racism, and despair, Tel Aviv has indeed been a bubble—a bubble that continues to draw to it many who still believe we can build a better future through action and not just through prayer.
The government will finally run out of excuses and be forced to hold a referendum on repealing the Eighth Amendment, also known as the constitutional ban on abortion. Despite all the progress we’ve made, a woman’s right to choose still represents a Brave New World for Ireland, and many will fight tooth and nail to maintain its continuing inaccessibility.
The Future of Cities: The journalist and She Shapes the City co-founder on the women behind Nairobi’s rapidly changing identity.
The Future of Cities: The ICP curator on urban panopticons, humans as data, and the selfie.
The Future of Cities: The artist on his portraits of disaster, invoking empathy, and Godzilla as “the loneliest guy in the world.”
Future of Cities: “Department of Buildings,” said Frank. “We have a complaint. Can we come in?”
The Future of Cities: “There are hundreds, perhaps a thousand empty villages in Spain like your Valdaves: abandoned, then forgotten. I find them new owners...”
The Future of Cities: Sara Elkamel interviews Tamer El Said
Uncovering the story of a grandmother's racial passing and its effect on following generations.
Bearing witness to the abusive relationships of others
How criminal records keep punishing long after they were intended to.
Putting a human face on the negative consequences of racially biased laws.
A new collection of David Foster Wallace's essays considers the ties between aesthetics, sport, and capital.
An Interview with João Gilberto Noll’s Translator, Adam Morris
How the Raid on Malheur Screened a Future Raid on Real Estate.
The most loved and hated Brazilian judge and why he matters to Brazil's future.
The photographer of Tiananmen Square’s “Tank Man” on creating art that “gets inside you.”
The Danish filmmaker discusses refugee children in Denmark, the safety of schools, and the quiet power of the observer.
“When you approach the second half of your life, you start to unconsciously consider what you’re passing on.”
He doesn’t talk much about his life in Sri Lanka before the war, only after, as if in 1983 when everything ended for some Sri Lankan Tamils is when his life begins.
What does a neglected disease tell us about who we choose to take care of and why?
Whenever the latest woe is me commercial came on hawking the newest painkiller, Mami commanded our attention: “That’s me!”
The Chinese video game artist on emotion-centered play, collaboration beyond language, and the next generation of indie blockbusters.
The artist discusses sewn paintings, tiled murals, and viewer inhibitions.
‘Keep your pecker in your pocket, Paddy,’ Jacques Aubry says, pointing at Mrs. Boyle’s swollen front, ‘and you’ll have less need for marching.’
The artist JAŠA on the importance of alchemy in his work, architecture as a means of expression, and the influence of Stéphane Hessel.
He lay in the dark, eyes closed, imagining what Lisa would say when she saw the gun. Would she beg?
A feature documentary considers the private lives of female sex workers at America's truck stops.
Student protest, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the rise of the corporate university.
A lot of different kisses, for very different reasons, that linger in the memory.
Henry Peck interviews Fred Kaplan about the shadowy world of cyber war.
How mass media declares murder—or not—in a small town.
On Music: A song is the complete acceptance of impermanence. It would not begin if it could not end.
The water crisis in the West has renewed debate about the effectiveness of major dams, with some pushing for the enormous Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River to be decommissioned.
Kyle Lucia Wu interviews Stephanie Danler about working in the world of fine cuisine, restaurant orphans, and the growing pains involved in moving to the big city.
A two-part inquiry on how ancient philosophy and medicine come up against pollution and modernization in China.
“Nothing Erased But Much Submerged” reveals memory as a process and singularly charged moment in which fire burns through the pages of a young girl’s diary.
A two part series on how ancient philosophy and medicine come up against pollution and modernization in China
When my father became my mother, gender reassignment in Appalachia.
The liberals who endorsed the war in Iraq now labor to whitewash its legacy.
A mother reflects on her grief during her son’s illness, and on her enduring love of reading.
The performance artists on the racial history of drag, jokes as a means of survival, and leaving room for paradox.
The unlikely bond between a hospice volunteer and a dying Vietnam veteran.
The director of Eclipsed on bringing the first all-female production to Broadway.
The visual artist on working with seeds and seeing the world anew.
An unimaginably endless life lay ahead of me, almost frighteningly so. Sometimes, when I thought about it, I became so agitated that I found it difficult to breathe.
Painter Thomas Paquette celebrates a half-century of the Wilderness Act
An examination of the role art can play in combating human trafficking
On Music: Violinist Stani Dimitrova discusses how 18th century composers are relevant today.
Reflections on the legacy of Chernobyl on the 30th anniversary.
A production of the Ibsen play embraces an unorthodox space.
The 2016 Guggenheim Fellow discusses his memoir The Narrow Door.
Rita Bullwinkel interviews Dolan Morgan on Losing Touch With the Boundaries of Your Body, Where the Absurdist’s Heart Lives, and the Ecstasy of Nothing.
A writer reflects on childhood memories of her neighborhood hotdog vendor.
Daniela Petrova interviews Curtis Sittenfeld on her latest book, Eligible, a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s classic novel.
How a digital media company is challenging stereotypes about the growing landscape of marijuana culture.
A journalist confronts her feeling of helplessness in watching a war from afar.
Sabrina Alli interviews Brett Story about her latest film, which unearths the presence of the prison system in our everyday geographies.
The breakthrough addiction medication and the doctors who risk everything to prescribe it.
The journalist on reporting from a post-revolutionary Iran and tracing the rich ferment of its intellectual and social history.
The genre-bending writer on queering history and restoring lost voices to American fiction.
Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery and the back-to-the-land movement.
Fortified with sock tea, he attends his morning group, which is called Steps. This to distinguish it from the afternoon group, which is called Group.
Bulgarians are physical people. I discovered that when I left and came to New York.
Both Brazil and the United States teeter on the brink of uncertain democratic futures.
On Music: Introducing a new monthly series about music across cultures.
Confronting the legendary journalist after his recent controversial remarks.
In Good Time is the first mid-career survey of DuBois’ photographs on exhibit at Aperture Gallery.
Flash Fiction: We had no idea that a livid war was advancing on us like a sandstorm. We were committed to life, not death.
Twenty-two years later, in this era of social media, how do we mourn the Rwandan genocide?
Piotr Florczyk interviews Polish poet, translator, professor, and editor Karen Kovacik.
A look at the secret, defining force in a field largely comprised of autodidacts and bedroom enthusiasts
The musician and composer on the art of self-transformation, resisting cultures of exclusion, and what he calls "easy camaraderie."
India's premier graphic novelist on street hustlers and the perils of cosmopolitanism.
Here’s Jacob, in the grip of incomparable sorrow, being a total jaggoff to his friend. Insert interior monologue: What am I doing? When did I become such a dick?
It wasn’t like we hadn’t grown accustomed to male wooers after Pa danced his way out of the picture, but something about Casero, that old bag, pissed me off.
Claire Schwartz interviews Sigal Samuel about Kabbalah, queer Jews, and religion as literature.
Is Shakespeare Dead?: A production of Shakespeare’s Pericles offers both promise and frustration.
Protest, marriage, and migration in an age of ongoing crisis.
A new film takes a novel approach to Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset's life and legacy.
Why we need to recognize the changing face of Western families.
A conversation between Executive Director of the Correctional Association of New York, Soffiyah Elijah, and filmmaker Hyatt Bass.
On being a docent at Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights, as told to Katherine Hite.
The crudely staged terror-porn of Abu Ghraib has evolved into the highly stylized and sun-kissed wartime selfie
Catie Lazarus’s new talk show asks all the right “wrong” questions about work
Future of Language: We wanted to make Kenya our literary base from which to engage with the world.
Future of Language: The biologist and whale expert on cetacean diversity, listening to whales, and the possibility of culture in nature.
Future of Language: Scientists are experimenting with ways for people to communicate using only their minds. But at what cost?
Future of Language: The architect discusses the language of aesthetics and telling a story through a body of work.
Future of Language: The Native language activists discuss cultural incubation, intergenerational learning, and the role of legislation.
Future of Language: So what exactly is this “black sound” I am insisting exists?
Our human identity has been described as atoms dancing, a living poem, a moving message…
Future of Language: WIFE!—who would not tolerate this complaint of his, who no longer indulged his talking, who could not even bear to look at him.
Future of Language: Your given signs and pairs: mouth, kisses, red-pink, drink-apple, hurry-go. You have no tenses, only momentum into what’s before you.
How math can inform our civil and political works of art.
Considering the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for translation, emoji, and pop culture.
Darnell L. Moore and Kai M. Green write to each other about life as black feminists.
Kyle Lucia Wu interviews Jonathan Lee about his latest novel
An open letter to Argentine President Ing. Mauricio Macri and the Mayor of the City of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta
From learning to haggle in the medina to connecting more deeply with history, two New York City high-school students reflect on visiting Africa for the first time.
In the fight against extremism of all stripes, Europe has failed to transcend its capitalist roots and embrace diversity.
Heather L. Hughes interviews artist Tim Youd on the devotional practice of retyping great literature.
At Tepe Naranj, archaeologist Zafar Paiman is working to preserve the remnants of an ancient monastery—and the memory of Afghanistan’s Buddhist past.
“Think about the last time you read a novel in which someone went to cash a benefit check or paid for food in food stamps.”
Female leaders from around the globe trade notes on building a new women’s solidarity movement.
Nigerian artist Victor Ehikhamenor fills oil drums with the trauma of national memory.
Her feet were brown. She ambled closer. Darling, I’m you, she said. I’m you from the future.
I could tell that he preferred each and every stranger, even strangers he had not met yet, even strangers he imagined, he preferred those strangers to me.
What happens to Africa’s child soldiers when the war is over?
When Hong Kong used to be home
The depictions of Native Americans in Hollywood are still Hollywood
Filmmaker Kamal Aljafari talks to Nathalie Handal about the poetry of memory, and displacement in Palestine
The unforeseen consequences of a gender discrimination complaint
The power of pauses, structure, and zebra metaphors at Coney Island
“An essay is something that tracks the evolution of the human mind.”
The author on writing for Marvel, race and invisibility, and the radicality of romance novels.
The authors of The Good Death and Five Days at Memorial discuss disaster preparedness, impossible health care choices, and the notion of journalistic objectivity.
The work and lasting legacy of the young photographer killed in the Burkina Faso terrorist attack.
“You’re delicious,” he says, meaning it, remembering the taste of mango.
The personal and the political converge at Laura Poitras' new exhibit.
Is Shakespeare Dead?: A cultural inferiority complex leads to a quirky vision of the Bard.
The casino magnate is hollow inside—and that's how he likes it.
Lo Kwa Mei-en speaks to Jasmine Dreame Wagner about writing words filled with blood and rhythm
A report from the field in Iowa, where Trump gear is selling like hotcakes
The artist and journalist on reporting from Guantánamo Bay and Syria, glamor as a subversive power, and neutrality and boredom as weapons of the state.
"My complaint is against empathy as a moral guide. But as a source of pleasure, it can’t be beat."
"But where are you really from?" they ask, and I never know who to answer for, Thomas or Nuocheng?
The artist on primal super identities, photographing migrants, and motherhood as a source of creative power.
So you’re the hotshot diver, he said, if you won’t take any money, let me buy you a hot dog.
There's a man on the bus sitting directly in front of you. He has a small brown spider crawling across his red shirt, near his left shoulder blade.
What it means to be forever altered by a kiss you never saw.
Rhythm, blues, & coming of age through vinyl.
Ari Braverman speaks to Simon Critchley about the force that was David Bowie.
Doctors at Bellevue run specialized relief programs for asylum seekers that are survivors of torture.
The Democrats are just as guilty as the Republicans in some respects.
The translator discusses public secrets, private identities, and the final Neapolitan novel.
How the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster became a global design icon.
The Philippine cinema pioneer on why films are “the greatest mirror of humanity’s struggle.”
The author on depicting female friendship and fielding questions about unlikable characters.
The artists on cultural appropriation, performance as participation, and the struggle with modernity.
Area 51 has been hidden from the American people. For a long time. For their own good.
It seared their eyes. Squinting, they watched the light dilate, divide in six. The rocket fell away, limp, useless, and dark as a new star grew against the storm.
The first installment of the series features a fairy tale come to life, if only for a moment.
Introducing a new series on perhaps the most intimate of human interactions, in all its forms.
Lessons of peace, unity, and selflessness collide with ethnic cleansing in Modi’s India.
A look at creative humanitarian projects happening around the world
Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 is essentially an unfinished metal structure.
Police records can haunt a lifetime, but they don’t have to.
Boundaries are drawn, and erased, by disease rather than man-made warfare—but no one seems to have noticed.
An exhibition of the artist's Cor-ten steel sculptures offers a meditative experience.
What are we celebrating when we memorialize world leaders?
Boundaries of Nations: The Nonviolent State of Iraq and Syria. The Republic-in-Motion of Lovers Not Fighters. The Government-in-Exile of People Who Just Want to Go to School.
Boundaries of Nations: The director on depicting the African migrant experience in Italy, moving in with his film’s lead, and the “common language” of pop music.
Boundaries of Nations: The researchers on the politics of mapmaking, rethinking invisibility, and why dots are changing the way we look at cultural borders.
Boundaries of Nations: The author and activist on growing up under siege in Sarajevo and chronicling the childhood memories of other survivors.
Boundaries of Nations: The scholar and author on Cuban contemporary art and how changing US-Cuba diplomacy may impact the art world.
Boundaries of Nations: What a joke American pool is. They play with miniature sticks on a tiny table with a bunch of tiny multicolored balls, a bunch of toy balls, just like between their American legs.
Boundaries of Nations: With time, I learned to love and master my scenes.
Boundaries of Nations: In the borderlands of northern Mexico, a legacy of violence.
Boundaries of Nations: The UK isn't like Downton Abbey anymore.
The artist discusses his new show on the chemist Rosalind Franklin, the nature of history, and the role of the internet in dismantling colonial legacies.
How an inclusive curriculum could be just the disruption American classrooms need.
Reflections 100 years after Typhoid Mary’s quarantine on North Brother Island.
Flash Fiction: Here where I find myself in a razor-sharp eternity, grant me one deep free breath.
Artists and community organizers discuss racial segregation, social justice, and filling in the gaps of our public school system.
The great die-off of America's blue collar whites.
What we don't talk about when we talk about HIV and AIDS.
A house is partitioned along the lines, and in the chaos, of the new independent nations of India and Pakistan.
The performance artist on going solo, inhabiting dangerous spaces, and the grotesqueness of time.
Block by block she maneuvers through the teeming sidewalks of Kabul’s Shar-E-Naw shopping district until she enters Ice-Milk Restaurant, stops at tables.
The novelist on what atheists and true believers have in common and how Mark Twain, Henry James, and “Sigmund-fucking-Freud” lack imagination.
The artist on his current New York solo exhibition, inspired by the religious coexistence of a more peaceful era.
A year ago he brought the pox blankets back to the natives after a well-meaning group of illegal tourists stole them away. On return he had a sort of quiet breakdown.
He led her away, down one tunnel, then another. He took her through a passage where the bones were piled so high they had to wriggle over them on their bellies.
Do Hollywood blockbusters fuel corporate space exploitation?
The critic discusses his new book on the grittier side of Paris, and the effect terrorism might have on France.
Flash Fiction: I remember their voices. Hushed when the sun beat on our backs, loud when the moon returned, illuminating our darknesses.
What it’s really like to be a student of color in the Ivy league.
Part II: The Scientist Who Kept Pushing, a continuation of A Line Through the Heart of Paris, the original Prime Meridian.
Part I: Following La Meridienne de Paris and meeting François Arago.
Alone, un-housed, we moved with the current, the future suspended like the long lines of a spider’s silk flung loose on the air.
The author on what evolutionary science can teach us about art and literature, his enduring interest in Nabokov, and why a good joke never dies.
In search of the mother who gave her up for adoption, the author finds six siblings instead. Decades later, she contemplates the drug addiction that cost many of them their lives.
The playwright and novelist on state censorship in Egypt, women in revolutions, and writing as an act of hope.
Three contemporary Egyptian artists take the self as subject in exploring post-revolution politics.
I would examine the black and white photographs of Alpullu’s golden age. In their shadows, I identified the vanished town.
Then high school came, and my brother and I didn’t talk. I was some bitch-majesty in the schoolyard, and whoever said all tomboys are loved has never been a tomboy.
Yahdon Israel talks to Michael Salu about moving between texts and images
An excerpt from Ellis Avery's upcoming book of essays, The Family Tooth.
The acclaimed Mexican writer explores the paranoia of life amongst cartels.
A new exhibition in Pittsburgh explores the modernist past of the city's architecture, and the way forward.
Recent studies out of Alaska suggest there is much to learn about recidivism and treatment in preventing drug related violence nationwide.
A look at how the Iran Deal was made possible by unlikely groups.
On being mentored by Breyten Breytenbach and Paul Bowles.
The artist on multi-channel video work, the communicative potential of sound, and contemporizing performance traditions.
The political cartoonist on his new biography of Edward Snowden and living in an Orwellian age.
An exhibition at the Jewish Museum brings together a group of largely unknown artists creating provocative and unexpected work.
The husband wrote a letter every single day, sometimes more often. Sometimes, she didn’t open them, or deliberately misread them.
The daughter of a late police officer reflects on what it means to have an academic father in the force.
They needed a way to keep the fire going until morning—that was another thing they had on their minds.
Michelle García speaks to Cristina Henríquez about her latest novel
Seasonal agricultural workers in France face more challenges than ever before.
Selma Dabbagh talks about the personal and political in her debut novel, Out of It.
With a massive intelligence program, the US is still caught off guard
Europe has the capacity to receive refugees, they just don't want to.
From 1952 to 1981, a chemical used to clean airplanes contaminated the groundwater in a Tucson community. By the time the city stepped in, thousands were already sick or dying.
The filmmaker and journalist on the future of girls’ education in Afghanistan, “white savior narratives,” and documentary as an antidote to compassion fatigue.
In 1953, California sacrificed a town to stave its own thirst. But the act was futile, and the state is thirstier than ever.
The Turkish artist on moving to the epicenter of throwaway culture and imagining the life-forms that “might emerge out of the contemporary ooze.”
The late avant-garde composer’s Diary offers his musings on politics, prose, and the strange condition of being human.
When I met G I knew he’d figure in my life heavily, but I had no idea if our association would be sad or happy, ultimately—and I still don’t know which it will be, ultimately.
A family whose heritage spans borders, but separate experiences continues to divide them in their own home.
A historical perspective on language and the criminalization of African Americans.
This Columbus Day, a Caribbean carnival arts collective invokes the deeper principles behind Carnival masquerades to create social change.
The writer and editor speaks about beastliness in fiction, founding a literary journal, and avoiding the lure of “faux-weirdness” in his work.
A mother reflects on fears and stark statistics, following another school shooting.
The risky story-telling complicit in the public discourse on Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
For a sign language interpreter at a murder trial, the crowning achievement is utter neutrality.
Occupy Wall Street artist pens interactive online comic about Vietnamese refugees
A leading researcher on the need to rescript our narratives about women and the environment.
Fragments on writing, publishing, and being an anonymous worldwide phenomenon.
The graphic novelist on coming of age in his comics, portraying Asian-American characters, and laying bare the anxieties of fatherhood.
A new documentary follows three climbers up one of the world’s most challenging peaks to explore the depths of commitment, passion, and calculated risk.
No one knows when exactly he became the thing I fed upon, the thing whose body works for my body, day and night.
I have a birthmark above my butt, which is undeniable proof of gypsiness.
Faced with a shortage of killer drugs, Texas executioners have begun manufacturing their own pentobarbital, a lawsuit charges.
“The radical creative act of freeing the inner, and outer, child.”
Flash Fiction: Even while she lay in hospital she was trembling for the well-being of her son
Violence and citizenship in Assam, as experienced by its forgotten
The winning entry of the 2015 Center for Women Writers Prize in Creative Nonfiction
Retracing Von Humboldt's footsteps, two centuries later, in a van.
Why a once forgotten scientist’s steps across South America are so tempting to retrace.
Empathy and immersion in virtual worlds.
Julia Pierpont sits down with Australian novelist Steve Toltz to discuss his new novel, writing about writers, paralysis, and why you should attend your high school reunion.
How art can provide us with different languages for discussing loss.
Boundaries of Nature: Each time my friend reaches for his resin, he taps into a global knowledge honed over millennia, a true people’s pharmacopeia.
Boundaries of Nature: The cultural geographer on the misunderstood relationship between people of color and nature, and how place shapes identity.
Boundaries of Nature: A physicist considers the appeal of miracles.
Boundaries of Nature: The acoustic ecologist on his fight to preserve dying soundscapes, how ambient noise affects the psyche, and recasting silence as a presence.
When have humans ever looked at something we need, or even just want, and walked away?
Boundaries of Nature: The scientist and writer on gender bias in the sciences and inventing new geometric forms through crochet.
Boundaries of Nature: The visual artist on the landscape of her native Canada, exhibiting at a nuclear power plant, and seeking to destabilize the familiar.
Boundaries of Nature: Water is always at work. We don’t even know that it’s eating the very ground from under us.
Boundaries of Nature: In books, he has read about boys and animals, how they form a connection, and then the animal dies. And the boy learns something about the harshness of the world.
Boundaries of Nature: An outtake from the book Preparing The Ghost, a writer’s playful foray into the world of a squid photographer.
Boundaries of Nature: What happens after we commodify the waves?
Flash Fiction:"What a perfect couple, two halves of the same little orange."
Boundaries of Nature: Huge swaths of Detroit have been surrendered to the wild. What happens when we try to take them back?
How we have been disenfranchised of our natural inheritance.
The city of lights, migrant refugees, and gay Muslim weddings.
A small bookstore pilots a new business model to stay afloat. Will it work?
America’s racist and rapacious War on Drugs travels abroad.
When the escape of bird watching along the Mexican border offers a glimpse of harsher realities.
The view of the 2016 presidential race at the Iowa State Fair is less than inspiring.
The writer and photographer on their first book collaboration, the connection between Hollywood blockbusters and climate change, and how “shared terror” can make us feel less alone.
I, without knowing, dreamed parts of a truth. One part is this: my grandfather on my mother’s side was a murderer. Or was he?
The documentarian on white savior narratives, making enemies of gunrunners and governments, and nonfiction film as art.
The authors discuss mourning in memoir and whether dreams belong in literature.
Political posters and propaganda on view at LACMA shed light on a tumultuous period in Germany’s history, when art served as a catalyst for change.
I look at his face; the green eyes, the wet mouth. I still feel the dream-softness of his hair under my hands; I feel like a grandmother, like a mother, like a lover.
Prove you’re mammalian by twisting / your neck a mere 160 degrees, / 180 if you’re under 30.
Can a distinction be drawn between developing nuclear power and nuclear weaponry?
'The Wire' creator and former Baltimore Sun reporter talks about a historic public housing fight, race and what makes white people go 'batshit, batshit crazy.'
The personal legacies of the many survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan.
Reflections on the legacy of a relief initiative strengthened through its own tragedy.
The politics of Christianity in Guatemala.
The elder statesman of alt comix looks back on the legendary series he co-created, Love and Rockets.
Zanele Muholi’s stirring portraits of South Africa’s LGTBQI community.
A sneak peak of Maria Elena Gonzalez’s solo show at the 31st Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts.
The author on fiction as activism, feminism in Indian epics, and cooking to conjure a sense of home.
They agreed to unspoken rules. Broken windows were OK. Broken bones were fair game. Graffiti was acceptable, as were rubber bullets and tear gas.
The water had been empty and now was full. This felt like what we should be doing with our human urge to meddle in natural affairs.
For a year or more before the six months that we spent preoccupied with our strange visitor, counterterrorism was our spiritual life.
The Israeli author on the dramatic family histories that fuel his work and the broken promises of his homeland.
Your beauty is catching, / all my antelopes are on fire & ruined.
The body unbuckles the door latch / and stands behind the screen.
The journalist on the “strange, extractive” process of interviewing; second-, third-, and fourth-act stories; and coming to reporting as “a real, whole person.”
Folk City at the Museum of the City of New York dives into the politics and nostalgia of New York’s folk revival.
Barbarians and apes—from the Opium Wars to the origin of the species.
We had been asked to piece together the conspiracy using only wool.
Joel Breuklander on what this anthology says about the state of short American fiction.
Does Hollywood’s reboot obsession point to a more pervasive cultural trend?
Part II, The Free Men of the Forest: The consequences of oil, development, and state intervention in an indigenous community.
A look inside the systems that move and manage California’s dwindling water supply, and the debates over who and what needs water most.
Singapore may be one of the world’s leading financial centers, but is governing against ideology risky business for democracy?
Part I, Ordinary Justice: After a spate of killings in 2013, an indigenous community threatened by oil operations struggles to come to terms with their new reality.
Two acts of terrorism stir up memories of the West Bank and homophobia.
The author and historian on the legacy of slavery, queer love, and the coded language of desire in the nineteenth century.
On the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, the granddaughter of one of the scientists who made the bomb pays a visit to ground zero.
In a sea of books and media on medicine and illness, too few give voice to the patients.
The foreign policy expert on global corruption, violent extremism, and how the West “has lost the balance between rectitude and liberty.”
Jindal mistakes entry into the American mainstream as a matter of shedding a hyphen.
How patriotism means never having to say you're sorry.
The writer and naturalist on the temporality of grief, inhabiting the voice of T.H. White, and developing radical empathy with a goshawk.
Jonathan Weisman on his new novel No. 4 Imperial Lane and a family history that might make you feel better about your own.
Every story I have ever told has a kind of breach to it, I think. You could say that my writing isn’t quite right. That all the beginnings have endings in them.
Stavros Stavros was fat and full at the end of the night. All he needed now was to deflower a virgin.
The Welsh novelist on badger baiting, human resonance in the natural world, and why he holds his breath while writing.
The New Yorker writer on the politics of surfing, reporting from war zones, and the “weird genre” of memoir.
Who has dislocated the world? / and why are birds circling in our stomachs?
Give me the names // of the slain. Say each name / like benediction.
I’ll never know what my mother wanted or felt about whether to keep her baby—it simply wasn’t up to her.
Flash Fiction: “Go? Stay?”— the uncertainty a stain of recursive ink, irremovable—“Stay? Go?”—the choice, the freedom to choose suffocating like a plastic bag atop her head.
We should take down the Confederate flag, but racism has always been and continues to be a national issue. A case study of Crandall v. State before the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1834 serves as a prime example.
Jim Shepard elevates the ordinary and makes a necessary addition to the literature of the Holocaust.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision, a traveling exhibit on the treatment of homosexuals under Nazism sheds light on a darker period.
In a lengthy response to stories by ProPublica and the BBC, Salazar addresses the allegations of former athletes and staff that he broke drug rules.
A woman in white came up to us and said, “You’re welcome here. Everyone is welcome here.” She motioned us into the sanctuary, Carol included, who kept on with her act like a road-show vaudevillian.
The mother of a black teenage son shares her worries.
Jacob Kiernan interviews the filmmaker on his upcoming project in Hong Kong, dislodged cultural identity, and the evolution of wedding photography in China.
Against correct answers and workplace utility.
Flash Fiction: I said if that’s the way it is then you know what that’s enough already.
It’s unbearable, hilarious, ancient, and everywhere, and we shouldn’t be afraid.
Can a country so fixated on the future simply forget its recent past?
Ian F. Blair interviews music critic Jessica Hopper on zines, fangirls, and being consumed by records.
Boundaries of Taste: The folklorist and curator on self-expression through adornment in African-American communities, and fashion as a political act.
Boundaries of Taste: Umami gives identity and intricacy to mother’s milk, a bowl of ramen, a writer poised between Japan and America.
Boundaries of Taste: The Turner Prize-winning “transvestite potter” on the taste tribes of Britain.
Boundaries of Taste: Chased from his native India, Sanal Edamaruku contemplates the power of offense and accustoms himself to his new homeland.
Boundaries of Taste: If we dance around our dead in New Orleans, it is because we have to.
Boundaries of Taste: The comedian on her radical education and the importance of safe spaces in the “hostile and dangerous world” of joke-making.
Boundaries of Taste: The filmmaker and artist on the evolution of bad taste.
Boundaries of Taste: And as I parted my lips and then, later, my legs, watching the last clouds of smoke slip upward, I kept hearing my mother’s voice say, “Jesus is a fire.”
Boundaries of Taste: Where we saw shape, line, and shadow—a nude—he saw a naked overweight woman.
Boundaries of Taste: Often derided as tasteless schlock, could the Fifty Shades novels actually reflect something much more serious?
Kashmir’s most infamous “fake encounter” leaves five families desperate for justice.
The essayist on unsentimental endings, Little House On the Prairie vs. Woody Allen, and why the conversation about not having kids “needs to be reframed.”
When I find out that Galway Kinnell has passed away, I will read The Book of Nightmares in a library, tears coating my face like sweat.
The writer on myth-making as a means to confront the realities of modern-day slavery.
Three photographs chronicle the devastation surrounding the war against apartheid in South Africa.
Firas rested his head on the back of the sofa, lost in the smoke. He wondered what that meant: a world where you can run wild.
you carry a heavier and heavier bag / and always feel it belongs to someone else
Flash Fiction: What he could tell himself hurt no one. A hierarchy of opportunity and morality.
How the Ayotzinapa case is sparking a movement in the South.
In The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter put her own spin on horror, the gothic, and old fairy tales, expanding the limits and possibilities of fiction.
Our understanding of Israel’s occupation of Palestine must be reoriented to acknowledge the relation between oppressor and oppressed is not one of equal responsibility.
An interview with Irish journalist and LGBT rights activist Una Mullally.
Flash Fiction: Convince yourself the race never stops running, that memory will eat you alive.
Since changes to US immigration law in the ’90s, many veterans are being deported.
The author on the genius slave musician who inspired his novel and the fallacy of a post-racial America.
The architect and writer on action as information, subtraction as growth, and indeterminacy as a practical protocol for design.
The Kurdish filmmaker on deploying a camera rather than a gun to fight for his community.
What can two portraits of President-elect Muhammadu Buhari, taken three decades apart, tell us about Nigeria’s political climate?
When the boy she was dating hit my sister, it made a sharp cracking sound, just like it does in the movies.
it’s as if the knuckle of tomorrow / has arrived today
On the sublime in Sally Mann, the painful reminders of Nan Goldin, and the impossibility of understanding the past.
Flash Fiction: Ibex. He loves the majesty of the word. And she possesses a majestic beauty, it is in the ellipse of her eye, the rearward drift of her horns.
Satirists and cartoonists working in the Middle East weigh in on PEN, Charlie Hebdo, and the meaning of free expression.
Facing a giant budget deficit, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal plans to borrow $750 million against future income from a landmark legal settlement with cigarette makers.
Natasha Lewis interviews Rachel Holmes, author of a new biography that elevates the life of Karl Marx's daughter, the pioneering feminist and socialist organizer.
Flash Fiction:You were the only person in the whole building who wasn’t singing me.
The journalist on the myriad ills of the meat trade, the plight of migrant workers, and the twin missions of journalism and poetry.
Every day I expect to wake up and discover that the morphine has worn off, and that Richard is back to the man he was before the surgery. Instead, quiet.
The Booker Prize-winning author on samurai sword fights, the trouble with literary allusion, and the fabled world of post-Arthurian England.
Inspired by Eduardo Galeano, the discovery that all wars—personal, territorial, political—have afterlives in our grief and memory.
He told them about the Internet, Steam, Apple, and Microsoft, which were the other names of Satan.
joypolice, even when there’s hunger and fear, we grab hold
In the face of mass displacement, unsolved murders, and discriminatory housing policies, New Orleans’ Black community survives in part through its artistic traditions and spirit of collectivity.
Flash Fiction:They came with their guns and their tools and no time to contemplate Time.
Vietnam and Iraq war veterans find closure only by returning to their war zones.
The scholar and peace activist on Palestinian centrism, living as an exile, and learning from both Fatah and Israeli soldiers on the road to radical compassion.
The “people’s lawyer” on her most controversial criminal defense cases—including the one that sent her to prison.
The New Yorker’s art editor on learning English through imagery, comics as cultural barometer, and collaborating with Art Spiegelman.
He did not want her to think what might possibly be true: that he was going mad.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, energy workers were at the forefront of progressive social reform. Is a similar union possible in the current age of fracking, oil sands, and climate change?
Purvi Patel's conviction in Indiana sets a dangerous precedent for using feticide laws to persecute women.
A writer finds herself with the help of Vikram Chandra and his latest book, Geek Sublime.
The acclaimed writer on reporting fiction, listening to Martin Scorsese, and the family values in his new novel, The Whites.
A Burmese poet and activist revisits the years of his incarceration, while urging change in a country that does not yet feel free.
The Sri Lankan-American novelist on Sri Lanka’s brutal history and grappling with the right to tell the story of the country she left behind.
The sociologist on the role of the artist in gentrification, challenges to affordable housing, and the commodification of New York City’s loft lifestyle.
The artist reimagines Robin Beth Schaer’s poem, "Messenger."
On director Wim Wenders’s documentary The Salt of the Earth, a look at the career and conservation efforts of photographer Sebastião Salgado.
Tanya was not surprised to find no one hiding behind the hedges when she looked out her window, but she was disappointed.
Our parents were too busy launching bombs over the river to notice missing fingers.
Paul Beatty’s The Sellout skewers the idea of “post-racial” society.
A visit to the 9/11 Museum that lasts much longer than visiting hours.
Shanoor Seervai interviews Met curator John Guy on ancient Hindu and Buddhist art, excavating shipwrecks, and the growing influence of Eastern art in the West.
The aftermath of a wildfire reaches every part of you.
The magazine is now accepting submissions for this year's themed issues.
Boundaries of Gender: This time around, Mama Paulina would marry a woman. She was not looking for a sexual relationship, but for a wife who would provide her with sons.
Boundaries of Gender: The psychologist on the evolution of maleness and the sociocultural forces that have long stifled men and fathers.
Boundaries of Gender: I stay because, as my mother never stopped repeating, I am my own woman, but also my own man.
The poet and cultural critic on the politics of motherhood and the expansive potential of the queer movement.
The activist on the ancient legacy and contemporary struggles of hijras.
He smiled, shyly, and then came toward Evan, and although in the red light the scars on Evan’s chest were not visible, Billy found them and kissed them.
Boundaries of Gender: In the early seventies, I began sleeping with a married doctor who wanted to cure homosexuality.
Boundaries of Gender: Getting out of doors, getting connected, and never calling anyone “bro.”
“I wanted history I could touch like a flank of a beast.”
Flash Fiction: Her name sounding like coming, like arrived, like I am here.
Four years after its revolution, what has changed for Tunisia, and for the rest of the world?
Boris Nemtsov had the courage to demand justice in Russia and to challenge Putin's regime; it cost him his life.
On interracial adoption in “post-racial” America.
The novelist on the vivid life of Margaret Mead, a love triangle in the South Pacific, and the shared language of anthropology and fiction.
The former New York gubernatorial candidate on misperceptions of big government, the poetry of politics, and why “it would be a tragedy if [Hillary] ran in an uncontested primary.”
The literary agent on gatekeeping, the truth behind big advances, and why Amazon neglects the “humanity to good books.”
“They’re back!” we hissed over our kitchen fences. “Someone’s got to stop them! Something must be done!”
The Jeffrey Sterling trial shows the U.S. government to be committed to deception about the Iranian nuclear program.
What the explosion in private political spending means now, five years after Citizens United.
In Orania, South Africa’s last remaining white-only town, the country’s history of racial segregation and white supremacy lives on.
Retha Powers talks to the awards editor and former editor-in-chief of Variety about the Oscars, and Hollywood's diversity problem.
President Obama must permanently stop the Keystone XL pipeline from being built.
On meeting fugitive Nehanda Abiodun in Cuba, on crossing other borders.
After her workplace, a Catholic school, dropped contraceptive coverage from the employee health care plan, one teacher came up with a proposal of her own.
Grace Bello talks to Columbia University bioethics professor Dr. Robert Klitzman about the anti-vaccination movement in the U.S. and its potent mix of misinformation, partisan politics, and fear.
Dharamsala is the end of the journey for many Tibetans fleeing their Chinese-occupied homeland, and where their stories are told.
The documentarian and journalist on the nation’s portrayal in the global media, the power of emergency cinema, and the role of the intellectual in revolution.
Humanitarian efforts may alleviate the pain, but do they stop the political strife that leaves victims bleeding?
The author couldn’t find a single press in the world devoted to publishing African poetry. So he created one.
An anthropologist examines the meanings of sacrifice and slaughter—with his own life as the case study.
“Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. Straight out of a Western movie.” He handed it over to Brady, who gripped the black rubber handle and ran a finger on the sleek, cold metal barrel.
I met Tracy Pasco in the spring of 1980—in my Pennsylvania hometown, a time of relative optimism and ease.
Blooms one day a year. Let wolves / suck marrow from the bones of boys.
We who crossed paths with the bomber / and lived the whole afternoon through.
Aditi Sriram talks with the founder of Inkwell, an online national black book club that launched yesterday, about supporting black writers and influencing the marketplace..
Flash Fiction: She watched her heart beating again and again like an unanswered question, like a phone in her chest that would not stop ringing.
Alex Zafiris talks to French director Céline Sciamma about her new film, Girlhood.
In Gavdos there is a sort of collective protest against the past. Not against history and the stubborn patterns we mistake for certainty, but against all evidence of time beyond the beach.
The trans author and journalist on masculinity and male privilege, writing about the body, and crafting new narratives about gender identities.
The journalist and teacher on a century of muckrakers, the pleasures and perils of reporting, and the golden age of investigative journalism.
First there was a little crackle as the pin scratched the record and then the voices would begin to sing or talk and would float into the surrounding inky darkness.
"I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror." —Alberto Gonzales
you don’t think of Vermont / when you think full-blown heroin crisis. / I don’t see why not but I’m not from here.
I lock my tongue / even though I’ve prayed / in Persian for a thousand years.
Twenty-two veterans commit suicide every day. In the graphic novel Walking Wounded, Olivier Morel and Maël set out to tell their stories.
A President’s superstitions and an astrologer’s fate.
Chelsea Haines talks with artist Jon Rubin about the surprisingly controversial politics of serving Palestinian food in Pittsburgh.
Cartoonists across the Middle East denounced the Charlie Hebdo murders with work that reflects their own daily struggle against censorship and intimidation.
Ten years after the Indian Ocean tsunami, remembering normalcy and chaos in the province of Aceh.
The award-winning Catalan writer on political attempts to repress his native language, inventing stories to tell the truth, and the powers and pitfalls of memory.
When we moved to the Ella Valley, my partner and I took great care not to build on land that might have belonged to Palestinians before the war of 1948.
The filmmaker and scholar on the radical legacy of American Communist film.
“I thought you’d get along.” “Why did you think that?” I say. “You do so well with wounded men,” she says.
There were so many places he could have lived, but he lived in the shack so he could dream of his daughter.
Being an immigrant made me feel different, but it was the color of my skin that marked me as suspect.
Flash Fiction: Do you really think the moon only exists when you are looking at it?
As the powers that be dismantle what remains of Hong Kong's mass protest movement, thoughts on winners and losers and the city's future.
The story of two asylum-seekers’ journey to Denmark.
These books won’t help you drop 10 pounds or achieve Inbox Zero, but they will remind you of the power of brand new ideas.
The politics of Picasso, Sartre, prose, and poetry.
Religion in America: The Devil as part of a rather American tradition.
The climate scientist on denialism and why her evangelical faith demands action.
Religion in America: Why does our humanity mean we are at once of God and utterly separate from Him?
The transgender rabbi on religious rituals, gender fluidity, and the language of LGBTQ inclusion.
Religion in America: Muslim revert Kenny Irwin Jr.’s Robolights display is a fixture of Christmas in Southern California.
The Hare Krishna monk on cultural stereotypes, teaching faith through food, and America’s obsession with yoga.
The artist discusses Hinduism in the diaspora, religious imagery, and her new show, Eyes of Time.
If he were superstitious, he would have blamed the monks for cursing him.
The house of the Memory God is filled with junk in piles. It started innocently enough, the way a blizzard starts: a flake here, a flake there.
good, God said, I took clouds and planted them / in soft, red clay.
Daring to celebrate an egalitarian tradition.
Jung’s concept of synchronicity was supposed to help us understand the world’s more wondrous events. Then Self-Help hijacked the idea to make it all about us.
When you know us, it’s harder to kill us.
Readpolitik: Reading the new Nobel laureate’s misty, wintry fictions in his misty, wintry city.
Flash Fiction: The daughter, the one they think they made all by themselves, holds the hand, and holds also the head, unwise and old and greedy.
In Arizona, the Samaritans are working to provide water and aid to immigrants crossing the border—in spite of sabotaged water bottles and harassment from border patrol.
Making a run for it through El Salvador’s violent and burning streets, before curfew begins.
The new Las Vegas invites you to defy or deny outright the desert that the old Vegas celebrated.
Punitive justice won't bring back Michael Brown--or Eric Garner or Tamir Rice or Trayvon Martin or John Crawford. Why unraveling systemic racism starts with communities, not courts.
For the past six years, Karen has lived in Missouri with her adoptive parents. But a Guatemalan couple are convinced the child is their kidnapped daughter, Anyelí.
The longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books on the history of racial justice from World War I to Ferguson.
In Buenos Aires, a tango dancer’s tragic accident ends her career—and unearths longstanding trauma.
The poet and curator on expanding autobiography, the importance of elegy, and the centrality of blues to experience.
Soon a rumor spread through the city that a pig was riding on another pig, circling through the streets, commanding the riot.
You’ll barely notice him, he won’t nag or pester you, doesn’t even sing the way other kids do.
she, standing there now with all the immodest strength / of a clapboard house, who has not even asked for this light.
Hilary Mantel’s The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher offers the same lesson to matter public and private: it could always have been otherwise.
Reflections on jazz, improvisation, and the New Orleans Jazz Fest, 2014.
Reflections on jazz, improvisation, and the New Orleans Jazz Fest, 2014.
Flash Fiction: What, for you, is the clearest image of happiness?
The National Book Award finalist on chronicling everyday racism, the violence inherent in language, and the continuum from Rodney King to Michael Brown.
At the top of the pantheon of spirits in Burma are the Thirty-Seven Nats. Twirling on earth, in a shimmering shawl, is their 74-year-old medium, U Nan Win.
The surgeon and public health journalist on the gaps in healthcare policy, the sharp elbows of politics, and dignity in end-of-life care.
Unearthing the stories of “coolie women”—early-twentieth-century indentured laborers shipped from India to work on sugar plantations across the colonial world.
Examining identity through costume, impersonation, and performance.
Only for a short time, my mother promised when she left, but the shortness has grown longer, many years, almost twelve, and I am now grown.
We reported on the two-way radio that the only nut alive asked to surrender.
Moonlight poured fiery poison into my life.
I’d sleep against the wall in the unemployment line / next to men who slit throats in another country
A trip to Turkey sparks a search for the ghosts of the Armenian genocide.
On the eve of Contemporary Istanbul, Rachel Friedman talks with one of Turkey’s most controversial artists about performance, process, and what happens when your art makes you a target.
The editorial director of Riverhead Books talks with Rachel Riederer about the intimacy of editing, hunkering down in the White House, and why book publishers remain essential in the digital age.
When they arrived in Abbottabad, my mother thought it was the most beautiful place she had ever seen. My father was glad for his homecoming.
The author of A Brief History of Seven Killings on Bob Marley, writing terror explicitly, and why sloppiness serves good storytelling.
I could still feel his touch, and each time I thought about his truck I felt guilty.
The writer on the faces of violence in conflict zones, and why poetry offers a form of liberation that journalism cannot.
One of many recipes inspired by centuries of yearning for the eternal duck.
She hugged me goodbye and left in her boat. I didn’t wait for the boat to grow smaller. I walked into the jungle. I wanted to be something real.
We realize, of course, that one day the force may strike again, leaving one of us breathless at the side of the road.
How did we get here? Where we feel guns protect more lives than they destroy?
Flash Fiction: “Perhaps,” he said, drawing the word out, “I didn’t quite understand the game."
Enjoy Sri Lankan food and hear four great authors discuss one big question: What happens in the aftermath of a three-decade long war?
On community, urban sprawl, infant mortality, and the Albany food co-op.
Trauma, death, and forgiveness on the front lines of American life.
Our latest dispatch from the pro-democracy Occupy movement in Hong Kong and the frustrating talks between students and government officials.
ISIS and the sadistic theater of learned helplessness.
In his new book, Owen Jones doesn’t convince with his conspiratorial theory of a neoliberal British Establishment, but he makes a vivid case for the disastrous effects of that ideology.
Remembering the late journalist Charles Bowden, who chronicled the depths of the violence consuming Mexico.
Aditi Sriram talks with the author of 'The Seasons of Trouble' about the five years it took her to write about Sri Lanka post-civil war, and whether the 'trouble' is really over.
The new books our staffers are loving this autumn.
A response to Elif Batuman’s “Marriage is an Abduction.”
Lara Zarum interviews the author of "The Teacher Wars" on the history of education reform and the future of teaching.
Consider this practical advice before running a successful dictatorship.
The longtime Beijing correspondent on the roots of dissent in Hong Kong, China’s “Me” generation, and the precarious expansion of Chinese civil society.
The writer on coming of age in dichotomous Baltimore and being warned against writing about race.
In the South’s bloodiest prisons, Baptists say they can reform prisoners by turning them into missionaries.
The curator discusses her preference for non-linear perspectives and truly independent thinkers.
You can no more waterboard yourself / than sneak up on yourself at a party
Liao’s panoramic images of the city appear to be documentary. In fact, nothing is true.
In Hong Kong, participatory democracy fights the forces of inertia and autocracy.
Readpolitik: The real political choices in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Jeffery Renard Allen’s Song of the Shank
The author of Booker-shortlisted novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North talks with Dwyer Murphy about the Death Railway, family history, and the trouble with empathy.
Lara Zarum talks to Steele, director of the documentary Hunted, about his experience following Russia’s brutal anti-gay vigilante groups.
As protests continue in Hong Kong, pro-Beijing forces threaten the movement for self-determination.
Dispatch from Hong Kong's Occupy Central.
In the 1990s, as Kashmiri men fighting Indian occupation were tortured and killed, Kashmiri women silently suffered through a different kind of war.
A journalist and a cardiologist discuss healthcare gone haywire and how Americans are medicating themselves to death.
Home from the oil wars abroad, US service members and military contractors are flocking to North Dakota’s emerging boomtowns.
The scholar of African-American religion on black megachurches and the marketability of the American Dream.
The privacy advocate and legal advisor to Edward Snowden on today’s surveillance empire.
The art critic and activist discusses the power structures of the art empire.
I wanted to stop something, everything. I applied for a job in airport security and they placed me here.
PFC Larry Pierson, a 21-year-old Afghanistan veteran from Vermilion, South Dakota, had made off with four M-16 A2s, six thirty-round magazines of ammo, and two M67 grenades.
Guernica's staff collects some facts and figures on who has the power (and the money) in America today.
The talking heads are giving us bad information. So why are we still listening?
In defense of Rob Kardashian, and turning your back on the family business.
Nicole Audrey Spector interviews the artist, community advocate, and MacArthur "genius" grant winner about the power and limits of art in troubled communities.
Flash Fiction: she told me that at one i reached out and struck his closed right hand with my fat unsteady palm.
For-profit colleges have become American Dream crushers and factories of debt.
How labor issues are expressed through assimilation and exile, in fiction and in real life.
Is the US attacking ISIS to avoid looking the fool?
Philip Zimmerman talks with the acclaimed novelist about false starts, art world con games, and why fate draws us to the novel.
It’s almost here! We’ll be set up this Sunday, September 21 at the Brooklyn Book Festival, Booth #402.
The founder of The Climate Mobilization talks with Bridget Read about how psychology—not science—may be the key to ending America’s climate denial.
What to do when you're running out of time.
The former assistant secretary of education grapples with the school-reform movement and the systemic issues that plague American education.
When the religious right co-opts the push to reinvigorate civics education, dubious legislation reveals the most powerful people in public schools.
The debut novelist and former Jehovah’s Witness on being a child preacher, leaving the church, and the safety of a good book.
In NEGROGOTHIC: A Manifesto, The Aesthetics of M. Lamar, the artist re-envisions historical narratives to break open the present.
I only question my father about these half-truths now, after all these years, because of the nightmares. Because I think about my mother. Because I imagine leaving my husband.
The apocalypse was quiet. It had a way about it, a certain charm. It could be called graceful. It was taking a long time.
I carried our wedding china out to the dock, threw every goblet into the ocean.
Nika Knight interviews the Occupy activist about her time in Rikers, the roots of her politics, and her upcoming trial.
Photos are how we remember. The 9/11 images we no longer see are growing gaps in our collective memory.
Andrew Rose talks to Courtney Moreno about her new novel, the specter of PTSD, and hazing in medicine.
Readpolitik The future worlds of David Mitchell and Emily St. John Mandel.
Brutality must be compartmentalized in respect for its victims.
Flash Fiction: My mother is the goddess of the seas. My fetus still floats in her womb.
We think using harsh prison punishment makes us safer. It doesn’t.
How a global warming president presides over a drill-baby-drill America.
Kevin became interesting only after the night he walked me home, committed his crime, and called the police.
A mother confronts the waning paternalism of doctors and comes to terms with needing the care of others.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer mines the ongoing resonance of the Camp David Accords, on stage and on the page.
Our guest poetry editor selects poems that sit on "the knife edge between what we call the everyday and what we call the night."
The novelist and reproductive rights advocate on motherhood, sex, and the sensuality of restaurant life.
Disregarding Hunter S. Thompson’s advice, Danny Lyon set off to “record and glorify the life of the American bikerider.”
I don’t remember the trial, of course, but I’m told there was a stink of hatred in the room that would undo your tie.
Half of this / is an illusion. See here you / there is no place that does not from.
It’s your turn, it’s always your turn, / the night says.
An environmental opportunity where the Danube River meets the Black Sea.
The real story behind the “invasion” of the children.
Nathalie Handal talks to Kareem James Abu-Zeid about translating the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish and conveying the layered politics and fluid identities found in his work.
The Uruguayan writer on riddles, lies, and lives.
A veteran of Afghanistan on the botched militarization of the Ferguson police.
As Iraq faces a new crisis, the novel Baghdad Central explores the freighted “moment of ambiguity” a decade earlier.
An Army sergeant reflects on his service in Iraq and how his family’s history with PTSD led him to sign up in the first place.
The acclaimed novelist on the secrets, dreams, and myths that fuel her storytelling.
A mathematician destined for a plum job in finance drops everything to become a freelance journalist in war-torn Congo.
The novelist and visual artist discuss their collaborative work “The Mastermind y lo contrario.”
Bigness required boundaries but this water had none save the shore we stood upon and the end of my eyeball’s reach.
When we returned by a pinprick in darkness / we found ourselves in childhood
A year after the Raba’a massacre in Cairo, one writer struggles to redraw her relationship to the city.
A straight white American man on loving James Baldwin and learning to write about race.
An Indian politician retaliates against religious offenses by compiling his own, even more blasphemous, thoughts on religion.
Flash Fiction: Now, dearest Queen, let me be direct—why I’m writing to you? I need your help in this country.
On Sunday, Turkey will elect a president by direct popular vote for the first time, choosing between drastically different visions for their political system.
Dispatch from Gaza: What is there to do but push back with a bit of stubborn strength, scratch at the thing with your bare fingernails, while your veins still have blood in them?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgians turned en masse to religion. Today, the Orthodox Church’s conservative beliefs are clashing with the country’s increasingly close ties to the EU.
Dispatch from Gaza: A diary entry describes one hour of a sleepless night during the fighting.
On the nuclear weapons era, or the true end of the beginning.
How to wean our mental health system off a diet of pills and insufficient medical access.
What the CIA clashes with the Senate Intelligence Committee reveal about the national security state.
His son’s diagnosis—hypoplastic left heart syndrome—has one father thinking about the reasons to run.
The novelist on mythic creatures, horror stories, and sensory maladies.
At times I wonder whether they considered me a human being or a lamb to sacrifice for their own good.
The author on crafting new sounds, creating female characters, and portraying sex in literature.
The curator on the New Museum exhibition Here and Elsewhere.
I knew that the Confiscator was a bad man. I knew that my father hated and feared him.
Dispatch from Gaza: Day-to-day life continues even in a war zone, but sleep does not.
Flash: The twisted leg, the handful of feathers.
A response to Ben Austen's "Detroit Through Rose-Colored Glasses."
How we remember the woman at the heart of one of the nineteenth century’s most important collective movements.
An address to mark the Freedom Summer of the corporate civil rights movement.
A federal judge in Alabama says a local school board has failed to meet the legal mandate to integrate.
The poet talks with Jeannie Vanasco about leaving Iraq, working around censorship, and the work she’s most excited about now.
Andrew Rose interviews cartoonist/reviewer Kevin Thomas on distilling 1,000 pages into nine graphic panels.
Join Guernica as we celebrate summer and our forthcoming print edition at the Guernica Summer Benefit.
We’re on the cusp of the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history.
On a regimen of twice-daily baths and the life lessons learned therein.
Erica Wright talks with a poet who didn’t set out to write about war.
The Bangladeshi-British writer on news versus novels, swapping rural poverty for Wall Street, and “the power of story on the human mind.”
Rock bands, the academy as subculture, and staving off the crisis in the humanities.
The civil rights icon on Detroit, the limits of protest organizing, and what she’s learned over seven decades of activism.
The editorial director of Other Press on cultivating politically important literature, seeking new voices, and race and class in publishing.
A New York-based Brazilian writer considers her country’s unrest through the work of performance artist Paulo Bruscky.
The pool of blood had grown a custardy skin in the cold, so that as the wind blew, it strained and jiggled.
Boys cross rooms for Georgie, who is full in the way they like. Foxy is the word for it, Sarina thinks, whereas she is foxless.
What unnameable would throw this on the floor, / noon refracted through blue windows
The books behind the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand---and the men who read them.
What happens when a nice, middle-aged, straight woman writer writes lesbian lit.
On the narrative of discovery in global literature.
Why is the nation state at all significant for who you are as a writer?
Flash Fiction: I turn to see the man raising the stick and swinging it hard against the boy’s hip.
A mother's bangles as a proxy for her presence, for her love.
Sarah Françoise talks with the filmmaker, on the occasion of his MOMA retrospective, about political fiction, debating Godard, and fighting battles through the cinema.
What literary ambition meant for women in the nineteenth century—and what it means today.
Lost dreams, lost armies, jihadi states, and the arc of instability.
An Andy Warhol online auction hosted by Christie’s may have been good for commerce but was bad for the art.
The Stanford legacy includes a gorgeous campus and the origins of corporate personhood.
A review of Lost For Words that's also a comic strip.
The River Kwai passes through Latin America and Washington.
We knew what was expected of us. Negro privilege had to be circumspect: impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive.
The food writers on building a food movement that transcends class lines.
I always seek out the maids. I always want to help the janitors sweep. My wife says I have a Jesus complex. What I have is a class issue.
The Chicana filmmaker on documenting a debutante ball in honor of George Washington’s birthday in Laredo, Texas, and adopting the Mexican-American border as her "muse.”
Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone paying tuition should care.
The “father of environmental justice” on the politics of protection and vulnerability.
The iconic graphic designer on personal responsibility, the dangers of corporate branding, and the power of art to bridge social divides.
The boys here looked past her, their eyes steadily transfixed on the procession of tight designer jeans and heels clicking through the quad regularly on the hour.
“I brushed Michael Bolton’s hair once,” I said, “and moisturized George Clooney too.”
Gin means you start down south and diesel / dye your stripper, that International Harvester, / through barbed wire
I say “and them” and mean / how in “the sticks” where I lived, the reservation, the mail / boxes were like maypoles at the end of the Earth
’d never had much interaction with people from the Hills—which is to say, other white people.
Abdl Fatah El Sisi’s landslide victory in Egypt’s presidential election only obscured the country’s deep-set apathy, particularly outside of Cairo, in the south.
In today's debtor's prisons, incarceration is expensive and starting over is nearly impossible.
If a humane death is to become a human right, we have to address the socioeconomic barriers that block so many from proper end-of-life care.
Choreographed War and Other Aspects of the World’s Greatest Game
Eight artists on this year’s controversial Biennale of Sydney, and the ethics and politics of funding the arts.
World War II is not a war we have to live up to. It’s a war we have to learn from.
Finally talking about June 1984---30 years later---will honor the dead and protect the living.
Clayton Lockett’s death exposed the secrecy that corrections departments across the country have imposed on executions—and shows us how unreliable and painful lethal injection really is.
Working at an outreach center puts a young idealist on the road to apathy.
On bridging the gap between Western fact and Chinese experience, twenty-five years after the June Fourth Incident.
Class in America: Seven writers, editors, and thinkers discuss how class divides Americans today and what we can do to fix America's inequality problem.
Flash Fiction: I dream of fat cats wearing sweatbands trying to get in shape on treadmills.
The feminist battle of the story in the wake of the Isla Vista massacre.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright on his relationship to Jewish artists, “the simple sense of being human,” and experiencing his work for the first time along with its audience.
Is Tech 2.0 boon or bust for quality of life in the Bay Area? A tourist investigates.
The Freedom Summer director on Mississippi and the role of music in civil rights.
In Bowls Balls Souls Holes, artist Mika Rottenberg imagines the hidden machinations of luck.
We walk along the forest on the side of the road. Onishchenko stops. “Give me your word, as one of the brothers, that you won’t tell anybody,” he says.
Daughter, your mother’s prayer teeth would sharpen / and shred your opaque sack of sleep.
The first half of Mad Men’s final season ended with a bright look forward, but not without reminding us how much has changed in the show over nine years.
At a Manhattan bookstore, Iraqi author Hassan Blasim’s reading touches off a discussion of more than just literature.
The changing nature of authorship in the age of mass media as illustrated by the MSNBC host.
On Monday, Narendra Modi will be sworn in as India’s new Prime Minister. Is he a savior for India’s economy or a threat to the country’s secular democracy?
It’s that look he loves even though he knows she isn’t really seeing him. He’s part of the landscape, inside her inner eye.
The country’s cartoonists find creative ways to defy censors.
The scholar on the vivid tradition of Haida poetry.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author looks inside 1979’s subterfuge and the lead-up to the Iran-Contra scandal.
The sociologist on turning the focus of the reproductive rights movement from abortion to love, sex, family, and community.
How much more must Syrians pay for their uprising against the Assad government?
A conversation with keynote presenters J. Morgan Puett and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.
Instead of sobering up upon seeing the beheading, I went along with the hooligans. Hell, I was one of them.
“This is how your parents have explained Paula’s coming: In Northern Ireland, the Protestants and Catholics are fighting.”
The pelt, dead and bristling, / might guard me from death, / a city wet with the rain of better places.
The legendary musician recounts the creation of the rock opera Here Lies Love.
Who decides the worth of black men in America?
The unreported story of how the Haqqani network became America's greatest enemy.
The PEN Prize-winning writer on his four-year journey as an undocumented immigrant, the “prison” of literary Arabic, and imagining a new Iraq.
Ari Shavit as harbinger of Israel’s new hard sell to American Jews.
The Jesuit priest, author, and avid tweeter on telling the story of Jesus through his divinity, and humanity.
David Armstrong inaugurates Casa de Costa’s new East 61st Street location with an immersive mix of sculpture and photography.
In the beginning, when God was distributing the land to all the nations, we Georgians missed the meeting.
Most people experience the fullness of what it means to be a person. Most people, but not him.
the prairies are overrun with pioneer wives out of time / carrying rifles
In Shadows at Dawn, historian Karl Jacoby uses a single moment of bloodshed to examine the persistence of violence in the U.S./Mexico borderlands.
As tensions rise in Ukraine, it's important as ever to understand the thinking behind Russia's bellicose behavior.
At the intersection of JR in Cincinnati & Susan Sontag’s On Photography.
Despite U.S.-backed violence against them, the Rio Blanco community is fighting back.
After a burst of Western interest in the mid-90s, and amid a complex system of government censorship, Vietnam’s contemporary art scene comes into its own.
Shared reading of García Márquez’s books was a way of finding an outlet for feelings kept and unsaid.
I feel the image of myself emerging in his hands, and with every flick and scrape it draws closer to his.
On the invention of “the liberal extremist” and the attempted assassination of a friend.
What fed the imagination of the man who crafted The Little Prince.
Talks to the director about his film Castanha and the blurred lines between fiction and reality.
The more late night talk shows stick with white, male hosts, the more obsolete they become in today’s America.
In order to pay for his son Cole’s life-saving surgery, he transported meth. But he got caught.
The publisher of Graywolf on the pleasure of finding books others have overlooked.
The Guggenheim fellow on returning to free verse in her latest collection, the difficulty of being joyful, and why poetry has taken the place of religion in her life.
In the fields of Brooklyn’s Jamaica Bay, a documentarian explores the transnational landscape of the sport of cricket.
For many years I had thought about my father’s suicide, about his various possible suicides.
Every profession had its misfits and mediocrities, but few attracted, as his did, the very people it was designed to help.
It should feel like you’ve rebuilt man / from woman’s most essential parts.
he was hoisted on the deck with his inheritance / of bones lowered in the berth
The Man Who Loved Dogs translator talks with Keith Meatto about Cuba, Trotsky, and the chemistry necessary for translation.
On McKenzie Funk’s Windfall, The Booming Business of Global Warming.
He wanted words to mean one thing. His cheeks burned. He knew this was a stupid wish.
What does it mean when a president, a professional athlete, or a movie star needs to paint?
In his futuristic novel, On Such a Full Sea, Chang-rae Lee fears for our ability to conceive of a better tomorrow.
One writer's reflections on country’s resilience, a bomber’s sanity, a government’s inertia.
Why the book I Am Malala is too simple an answer, the narrator too quick a martyr and the narrative too slyly an ode.
On the twentieth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, investigating copycat suicide and the lasting influence of the Nirvana icon.
The inaugural poet on writing through cultural dualities, the pleasure of bilingualism, and why “the poem is a kind of mathematical proof.”
“You made me hit you in the face,” he said mournfully. “Now everyone is going to know.”
The Jadaliyya co-founder on telling alternative stories about the Arab world, understanding the life cycles of revolution, and confronting “the weight of ancient problems.”
In Not Afraid of Film Anymore, Czech artist Tomáš Svoboda examines how we have become calm observers of modern horror.
The artist defaces dictators who amassed illegitimate power, and works of art.
The Taiwanese novelist's story of a passionate relationship between two young women.
I had never, in my whole life, been able to understand love as a sickness.
Good evening Secretary of the Interior Brain, glowing / wick of my infomercial light
the vertebrae went down and already / I saw no more than eternity and coldness
From Kiev to Crimea, glimpses of daily life against a fast-changing political backdrop.
Competition drives our sports, our arts, and our lives. It doesn't need to be that way.
When I came to the window, his motorcycle was lying on its side hemorrhaging gasoline and oil.
The writer and filmmaker talks to Anita Sethi about the roles of magic, humor, and research in her new novel, Jacob's Folly.
Flannery O’Connor, True Detective, Southern hip-hop, and the gnarled roots of Southern Gothic.
The National Book Award winner on substance abuse in the rural South and being told she’d written “just a Southern book.”
The “moonshine roots” musician on the magnetism of Southern music, learning to sing in church, and the timbre of the Tennessee landscape.
On the paradox of LGBT churchgoers, Mississippi’s copycat anti-gay bill, and the South’s damaging culture of politeness.
The Southern food historian on the politics of consumption, matzoh ball gumbo, and the multicultural “terroir” of the South.
Toward a definition of Southern literature that goes beyond twang.
The video productions and photo collages merge dance, animation, street culture, painting, and turntablism.
If we could just figure it all out then we wouldn’t have to keep meeting this way, year after year, always on the hottest day of the summer.
In my hometown in the American South, the region of the country known for its storytelling, men rarely said a word.
Savannah native Johnny Mercer trafficked in sui generis jazz, blues, and hillbilly sounds.
It’s no wonder the dead aren’t leaving to go into that goddamned light.
Whether or not you believe in Him, God abides in the everyday of Southern life, not tucked away in churches and synagogues, saved for special occasions.
There are the scrawny skateboard dudes with more tattoos than they have years of school.
It’s the first sunny day in a week, warm, the kind of soft-focus, liquid air that makes me feel half-time and drowsy.
We lurch after the authentic, whether dictated by white-column worshippers or BBQ alchemists or blues hagiographers or poverty tourists.
On returning to family roots in New Orleans and finding an altogether different kind of tribe.
The Signs Followers of southern Appalachia prefer not to be called “snake-handlers."
Despite all the efforts to whitewash the dangers of nuclear power, we still remember its catastrophic potential.
On Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's great satire of Turkish modernization, The Time Regulation Institute.
It didn’t matter if they strolled from his periphery or sprinted up from behind. He felt them coming like a warm wind.
Remembering Al-Mutanabbi Street on its 7th anniversary.
The author of The Isle of Youth on Florida, her influences, and the pressures of conformity that female writers face.
It’s not Americans’ jobs, but big business’s supply of cheap, compliant labor.
What happened to war and the imperial drive to organize the planet?
The Lebanese-American author on the dangers of writing what you know, the constant fear that he’s destroying his career, and why he believes that much of contemporary U.S. fiction is “not adventurous enough.”
Veterans of Guatemala’s long civil war recover the secret archive of the National Police, pulling together the missing parts of the past.
The satirist on drinking too much, learning to write through psychoanalysis, and making the switch to memoir.
The Caine Prize-winning writer on resurrecting history’s ghosts, finding stories amid political violence, and why “Kenya is a mercurial character.”
An excerpt from Karolina Breguła’s short film about a Hungarian town’s fear of modernity.
When he left home he always needed to find a Target, otherwise he felt lost.
I have two sisters, but I’m the one who works the ocean with Daddy, Cordelia Kings, heir to the throne.
While foreigners buy up the relics of Jamaica’s musical heritage, reggae culture lives on in Kingston.
Identity and amour in an Israeli kibbutz following the Six-Day War.
Fifty years ago, Forugh Farrokhzad’s 'Another Birth' modernized and scandalized Iranian poetry with its radical feminine voice.
Guilt was a knot in my grandfather’s stomach, and the decision to leave was a wound that only surfaced when he faded out of this world.
Behind him’s two bags on the curb. He needs the ride; I cut him a break.
The vice president and editorial director of Grove Atlantic on the art of literary editing, why publishers shouldn’t turn their backs on risk-taking writing, and how the first novel she ever bought went on to transform her career.
What the Elk River contamination tells us about a fading West Virginian mythos and the new meaning of Coal Country.
A trio of unlikely housemates navigates celibacy in sex-sopped Venice Beach.
On the power of silence, submission to force-feeding, and the first suicides in Guantánamo.
The National Book Award finalist on what makes a great sentence and channeling Roberto Bolaño.
The filmmaker on finding inspiration in poetry and the meaning of “home” in Palestine.
Jonah Bokaer’s immersive performances explore relationships between technology and the body.
I’ll dance in the spirit with rattlers at the First Pentecostal snake church.
A personal chronical of anorexia and the history of self-starvation.
What World War I analogies reveal about the current tensions between China and Japan
What kind of a war was this, anyway? All we did was move from our house to a stranger’s house, then one after another.
Nathalie Handal talks to the Italian poet about her sometimes disturbing imagery and how her work helps us decipher the world.
The relationship between Hitchens’ written and public voices illustrates the potential of the social author.
Millions of Europeans saw World War I as a positive thing.
Aspiring to that proverbial cup of sugar borrowed from a neighbor.
The Chilean playwright remembers the moment he learned what it means to fear one’s own words—and finds that from Pinochet to the Patriot Act, the state listens, watches, and waits.
Excerpts from Chinese dissident Hu Ping's seminal 1980 essay, translated for the first time into English.
Kamila Shamsie and Pankaj Mishra discuss the absence of political anger in Western literature and why we shouldn’t be so quick to condemn writers like Mo Yan.
When it comes to Kashmir, India acts as a police state, holding even speech hostage. Why this obsession with narrative control?
Are some acts so revolting that the people who commit them do not deserve a hearing?
The artist and curator talk censorship in the arts and Ukraine's crackdown.
Emily Parker talks with Yiyun Li about self-censorship in China, the line between fact and fiction, and whether it’s possible to create good art under a repressive regime.
If a company were to commit to decline all government censorship surveillance requests, it would be able to do business precisely nowhere.
I don’t bear the army any grudge. I think they did right to beat me.
I gave strict instructions for two specialists to watch over you twenty-four hours a day.
Would I want a house full of dead sparrows? No, I wouldn't.
Free Expression: The surprising weapon of the Taksim Gezi Park protests: a cheery disposition.
The writer and filmmaker on her encounters with commercial censorship.
A playlist for remembering the singer and activist who could turn an audience into a choir.
Then she did hear something, a scratching deep inside the walls, like something was trapped in there.
What happens to a tethered windhorse? To a prayer stuck in your throat? On self-immolation in Tibet.
A former prosecutor reflects on wrongful convictions, Damien Echols's memoir, and the importance of prison arts programs.
Mohsin Hamid and Akhil Sharma's conversation about writing, literary labels, and how illness challenges narrative.
Faith continues to both unite and divide Americans.
The electoral effects of economic desperation.
The Washington Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. Amazon is under contract to keep them.
After an itinerant childhood with her missionary family, a young woman discovers the distances that remain.
Her mother’s final death, then, came both hard and as a relief.
A writer and mother learns what it means to be foreign and dark-skinned in the United States.
A catalog of objects, ideas, and image, Richard revisits the readymade and its emancipatory potential.
Jerusalem-born artist Einat Amir creates environments for strangers to interact.
Think of your being a Jew in terms of having been born with clubfoot: unfortunate, of course, but not the end of the world.
I never did heal, we each / took our turns at crying in cubicles
Flash Fiction Crazy is not hereditary or anything like that.
Alicia Oltuski talks with the novelist about writing habits, slippery science, and terror.
In the wake of the holiday season, reflections on a polyglot Christmas.
A response to Grist: It's not about the buses, or, why San Franciscans don't love Silicon Valley.
Disasters may be natural, but who survives and who suffers most is often political.
A recent production of Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo demonstrated the play's tragic resonance. One wishes the story was further from truth.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum, a skeptic studies life and death through architecture.
She gives me a strange look, turns off the tap and wraps herself in a towel so that her secrets are hidden again.
Asghar Farhadi’s The Past raises questions about what makes a film Iranian and how we should treat that category in the first place
The fourth installment of The Social Author examines how literature lost its conversational dynamic, and why that’s a bad thing.
On a season spent in turmoil, transition, and the glitzy winter wonderland of Harrod's of London.
A conversation with Julia Ingalls on the fiction and non-fiction of child abuse.
When a natural resource becomes a weapon of war.
Flash Fiction from PEN's Prison Writing Contest: I have written 721 pages of letters to you. The paper I write letters to you on is 8' x 10.5'. I hate that.
The controversial author unravels the complexity of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the “inevitable tragedy” at the heart of Zionism.
A central Pennsylvania town, overrun by outsiders looking to make a buck and leave, confronts the natural gas boom and its own unpleasant truths.
The Danish filmmaker spent four years filming Chinese artist Ai Weiwei despite heavy surveillance, and the impact the film could have on the artist’s future.
The American painter on the terror of a blank canvas, finding inspiration in the streets of New York, and how motherhood has impacted her art.
Joshua Decter grapples with art’s inherent contradictions; the Los Angeles race riots; and a contemporary artist’s social allegories in response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Art is a Problem.
Joshua Decter on the intersection of doubt and commitment in art.
Cheon pyo Lee charts the idiosyncratic nature of value.
I had felt him in my blood vessels, for he had come to live in me and I had begun to smell like him, and with his eyes...
Part essay, part interview, part author, part reader, part 'she,' part The Man of Small Vital Facts.
It's not too late to write to Santa for these.
The artist-activist talks with Michael Klein about surviving cancer, working in the Congo, and how both came together in her latest book, In The Body of the World.
A photographer who understands Nabokov’s assertion that “imagination is a form of memory," that as human beings we are forever recreating our own lives.
On The Punk Singer and Kathleen Hanna’s riotous remaking of American grrrlhood.
The journalist on researching lust, the myth of female monogamy, and why “voyeurism is essential to good writing.”
The general editor of the first major collection of black quotations on art and expression throughout African-American history.
After eighteen years in South Carolina, the first state with its own border patrol unit, a woman makes the decision to “self-deport.”
The longtime climate change activist talks about online organizing in the Global South and the incremental nature of political change.
Can the art world embrace straight talk, or is it doomed to sound liked poorly translated French?
To get to the point: last night an iceberg slid out of my mind and into the room, sheathing first the windows and then the walls with frost.
Youtopia is part of Presented Without Interruption, a monthly video series curated by Guernica's art editors.
“The Pacific Ocean,” he was telling their children through the rearview mirror, “is greater than the Atlantic. Many creatures are living there.”
Just tell me it’s impossible for someone / to stop being invincible later on after starting out that way.
Move over, Dear Abby. Colonel Manners answers your questions on the etiquette of war, nuclear threats, and civilian surveillance.
On storytelling and survival in post-disaster landscapes, from Tacloban City to Staten Island.
It was just another Friday afternoon in the CBS studios, until it wasn’t.
A former assistant district attorney reflects on the Day of the Imprisoned Writer and the intimacy of the handwritten word.
Ela Bittencourt talks to the director of Losing Sonia, a profile of an Orthodox nun and icon painter who reflects the changes in modern Russia.
“You’ve killed zero point seven something people today. That’s like, a torso and a head.”
Wendy Davis’s filibuster becomes a book, a performance piece, the origin story of a new political star, and a symbol of change in a maybe-not-so-red Texas.
“The last chapter is the most difficult to finish in a revolution, as in a novel,” writes Khaled Khalifa from war-torn Syria.
Investigating the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the UN lead commissioner recalls the surveillance and corruption that obstructed his team’s search for answers.
The writer and translator on the U.S. healthcare system, her guilt over creating characters from real life, and why she’s “not a good political militant.”
The activist, educator, and former leader of the Weather Underground on upholding revolutionary principles in “non-revolutionary times.”
Evading Chinese censorship, the Gao Brothers challenge authority through sculpture, painting, performance, and photography.
I could understand how difficult it must’ve been for two beautiful boys to resist one another, you, and my friend. But what happened next was what I had a hard time wrapping my head around.
The little people eat on the couch while Berchta and I eat at the kitchen table, and she relaxes enough to grouse about how no one appreciates the old gods and goddesses anymore. I assume this is a typical complaint among mythical figures.
where we assemble the lone // and are among them.
A response to Muhammad Idrees Ahmad on the dangers of intervening in Syria, and of false logic.
The third installment of The Social Author explores social authorship and holy texts.
A quarter-life crisis during Mardi Gras, the Soviet Union right after it crumbles, and the murders in Mexico in 1990s are definitely things to write home about. Or to write books about.
He brought sushi to campus dining halls and revamped the dorms. Now he's wondering whether he did the right thing.
In a deserted sniper’s lair, reminders that some wounds are very slow to heal.
On Mark Kendall’s documentary La Camioneta, doing business with Mexico’s drug cartels, and what old school buses have to do with self-determination.
In Turkey, different colors have long been associated with particular beliefs. Most recently, a rainbow coalition has spread across the country.
In the occupied West Bank, “Undesirable life is ended, and unauthorized death is banned.”
The acclaimed & Sons author on the importance of entertainment, his slip into obsessive-compulsive behavior, and why he believes Salinger chose seclusion.
Writing against the cultural aversion to aging and the aged, the feminist scholar explores our impulse to stop time.
Face-to-face with survivors of one of the most infamous drone strikes in Pakistan.
The 2013 National Book Award Finalist on magical thinking, never breaking a vow, and why she wants her poems “to have long legs.”
The husband did not stop until he reached the ocean. Did not turn to wave at the woman he would widow.
Frank pays John to meet him at a hotel when Frank is in town so John can tie him up and leave him alone like that for eight to ten hours.
Will Obama block the Keystone pipeline or just keep bending?
How Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave accomplishes what other films have not.
I crawled out of the bed wearing my PJ top and these little Wonder Woman Underoos.
Forty-five years after authorities crushed a peaceful student movement in Mexico City, a graphic design collective champions their cause through political prints and cultural workshops.
In 'Never Built: Los Angeles,' a new exhibit at the Los Angeles Architecture & Design Museum, a city’s unfulfilled past offers inspiration for its future.
One hundred years later, why is George Herriman’s Krazy Kat still so radical?
The author reflects on her fifteen-year friendship with the physicist’s granddaughter—or perhaps his second illegitimate daughter.
The prolific novelist on historical fiction, overthrowing oppression and her two most recent works, Daddy Love and The Accursed.
Mental health, spiritual healers, and the hidden afterlife of war in Sierra Leone.
The writer-musician rewrites the Battle Hymn in his new novel, The Good Lord Bird.
The photographer’s new book defies borders and conventions in central Asia.
We were Boudreaux and Rothschild, Miller and Stackowski, O’Toole and Greene. We were Dani, Alyx, Rickie, Carlita, Jaz, Sam. We were butch. We were femme. We were bois. We were a tribe.
When the previous summer’s blackout revealed that Barrett kept his family on an electric well pump rather than pay the town for water, Patrick had eased his mother’s shame by announcing that nothing pleased him better than a bath in the pond.
I looked in the mirror and saw myself stealing things with a devil.
The second installment of “The Social Author” looks at multimedia storytelling, from the Chauvet cave to the internet café.
The Syrian poet Adunis has largely stayed silent about the civil war currently ravaging his country. His work, though, can help us reflect on the ongoing conflict.
No need for physical pain. Abandonment, helplessness, let a man feel these, and it’s more than enough.
The work of the prolific outsider artist defies labels.
Why isn’t required for every newborn?
What the work of James Turrell and Paul McCarthy mean in the contemporary art world.
As the New York Writers' Coalition annual Write-a-Thon approaches, some thoughts on the role of creativity binges—and community—in the writing life.
“American exceptionalism” does not mean what most people think it means.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Sound of Things Falling explores the imperceptible boundaries and lingering wounds of the Colombian drug wars.
Thoughts for the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.
In the modern redux, penis is patriarchy, and patriarchy is violence. But must to show one's penis be to endorse power and privilege? An, er, intimate reconsideration of male nudity.
On Occupy Wall Street’s second anniversary, revisiting the expectations and disappointments of the general strike meant to reignite the movement.
The multi-prize-winning author talks about dissecting 1970s Britain in her new book, the “loathsome” idea that motherhood is incompatible with writing, and why stutterers make good novelists.
Revisiting Brownsville, Texas.
The New Yorker journalist on the decadence of Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley; institutional decay; and the widening gulf between rich and poor in America.
Larissa Sansour explores the Palestinian condition by using science fiction in her films and photography.
A map showed a tiny airplane, a jagged line trailing it, seemingly hovering over a dot named "Teheran."
The wolves patrol back and forth and back and forth along the forest periphery and terrify the village children but not the parents—the parents are too busy with their politics and knickknacks to notice much about the wolves.
It means you can still feel the heavy thrum of thigh / on saddle, can smell the man’s blood-hunger
but the girl stayed dancing / underwater a wild catfish tangled in broken whiskers / until you couldn’t tell them apart
Why high wages are good for the economy and right-wing diatribes are not.
A recent exhibit in Barcelona showcased the Chilean author’s unpublished manuscripts and demonstrated how much more there is to learn about his work.
Wishing for the Syrian civil war to be a revolution doesn’t make it so.
Even if America attacks, the impact will be minimal.
Five fucking years, I thought. This is what my brother’s life is worth in Mississippi. Five years.
The multi-award winning writer on immigration reform, returning to Haiti in her new book, and why Wikipedia is still “micro-categorizing women writers.”
Suicide survivors on the uncanny allure of the Golden Gate.
The acclaimed novelist & art critic on dismantling notions of gendered writing, the pleasures of translated texts, and “the clear divide between art and politics” in contemporary American fiction.
Without a doubt, my friend has told you the tale about my parents, and about the various things that I experienced when I visited the Forest of Irunmale.
Everyone is hoping that the just declared new country will be lucky, that the rioting and murdering will not break out as predicted by the expat at our bar the night before.
First he suspected she swallowed / the pins herself from compulsion, but then no, that was not it.
What’d’ya mean you don’t know me? / I’ve bought bibles off you before!
The author and comedian remembers attending the 1963 March on Washington, and feeling a movement converge.
At the Museum of Modern Art, Evans’s iconic photographs are seen in a new, fuller context.
The philosopher and author of Immortality talks with Susan Neilson about elixirs of life, the fallacy of the singularity, and why we should all get up early to meditate on our inevitable demise.
E-readers, texting, book trailers, and Twitter are not only changing the possibilities for writing, but also what it means to be a writer.
The Pratt Manhattan Gallery showcases design that’s meant to disrupt.
With guests ranging from Dorothy Parker to Frank Sinatra, Alla Nazimova’s estate was, for a time, both Hollywood’s social nexus and a hotbed of radical politics.
A trip to an Omani town provides opportunity for reflection.
A look at the carefree travel guys and the lost-and-lonely journeywomen who populate the road-movie genre.
Despite post-traumatic stress and opposition from two presidential administrations, a former USAID employee has helped resettle hundreds of Iraqis whose work for coalition forces brought threats on their lives.
The prize-winning novelist on learning English by copying out Moby Dick, politics in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his compulsion to write from a terrorist’s perspective.
Ezra Pound’s slogan was itself the product of historical recycling.
Censorship and freedom of speech in Sri Lanka, India, China, Burma, and England.
A champion for the bildungsroman publishes his first confessional novel based on his childhood.
They were full of stories, and right from the beginning they wanted to tell them all, and when they did they would look at him as if to encourage him to learn them by heart
In a pile, like sea anemones, the boys’ penises were dusted with sand and, in the starlight, bluish.
Who's coughing? It's my throat, that's all. / Really, no.—I never saw you.
A review of David M. Kennedy's The Modern American Military reveals the trade-offs we've made for our ultra-professional, self-contained, all-volunteer force.
She said this was for my own good—if I was kept in the dark, I would never be afraid of it.
Tracing Antifolk’s aesthetics and community, from the Lower East Side to Berlin.
A former Border Patrol agent recalls his first encounter with a body in the desert.
Can I, siren, laugh once more with the people I love?
The founding editor of Apology talks with Rebecca Bates about the trouble with lit mags, defining pornography, responding to book-hype, and avoiding becoming a weird old man.
The formerly blacklisted writer talks about censorship under the Gadhafi regime, seeking asylum in Ireland, and why culture in Tripoli is now “as important as food and water.”
In the disputed territory of Kashmir, civilians wage a battle without modern weapons against “the idea of domination.”
The writer-activist on the qualities of silence, bearing witness to trauma, and seeking sustenance in the world’s fragile beauty.
An Iranian writer finds meaning and meaninglessness in the fact of her Jewish roots.
In Syria, a photographer captures his subjects' pleas for normal life against the backdrop of the war-weary landscape.
We all waited, I think. I don’t believe anyone rose immediately. And this was because the dead man was capable of anything. If he had fallen, who knew what he might do next?
The trouble with night // is morning, she’s singing, wringing out socks / over a tub
Legacy Russell talks with the author of Evil Men about conversing with war criminals and the paradoxes of naming "evil deeds."
Why the term "amnesty" gets hurled at undocumented workers while plenty of corporate lawbreakers escape legal penalties.
"George Packer’s The Unwinding details the bitter realities of a stagnant economy, but leaves no room for malaise."
"What grows best in the heat: fantasy, unreason, lust."
The appointment of the first openly gay U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic presents both risks and opportunities.
The problem with the "but this is the law" response.
The acclaimed novelist and short story writer talks about sensual sentences, the controversy surrounding his first novel, and why his “enemy is blasé, detached, ironic art of any kind.”
A Libyan-American returns to make sense of the country after Gadhafi’s fall.
People come to think of their unhappiness as a disease, rather than the result of a traumatic world.
Mining in El Salvador exposes the contradiction between human rights and corporate rights under the international investment regime.
The documentary filmmaker on reenacting atrocity as an allegory for impunity in his new film, The Act of Killing, which exposes the perpetrators of Indonesia’s mid-century genocide.
Two Dubai-based artists explore a history of political and social tension through border-crossing sounds.
A couple years before I was born my mother took my four year-old brother and ran away, home to Massachusetts and her parents, where they holed up like fugitives.
He looks at me, into the core of my soul, and says, “This is my big white willy. I love my big white willy. It’s not a brown willy. It’s a white one.” He repeats this a few more times. My friends don’t quite know what to say.
An irreverent sample of “Strange Fruit” would signify a takedown of not only a great American jazz standard, but of a crucial civil rights work as well. You can probably tell what’s coming next.
A conversation between poets about writing place, time, technology, and transformation.
At this year's Gay Pride march in Paris, homophobia has its own flag.
On Taksim, tear gas, and loving a tyrant because he feeds you.
He leaned back into his driver’s seat, closed his eyes, and waited to feel something for the dead man.
The Nobel laureate on Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid, a new biography of South Africa’s revolutionary couple.
The “super-agent” talks about finding success with messy, difficult books, re-thinking how we publish works in translation, and the advice she gives to authors---no hotel porn on book tours.
A firefighter reflects on flames, family, and migration in the deserts between Arizona and Mexico.
The radical geographer explores the hidden, unmapped stories of his neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina.
How we blink and chew and find ourselves // cubicle-hunched, tightened under humming fluorescents
A play-by-play of Wendy Davis’s filibuster, and why it made such great, heartening, and depressing absurdity TV.
The protests in Turkey, and the government’s response, highlight a problem more complex than a single micro-managing autocrat.
Following the Fisher v. University of Texas ruling, some call for class-based affirmative action. However, critics warn that may be the end of black and Latino representation in American colleges.
Dino Buzzati’s masterpiece of sports journalism, an account of the 1949 Giro d’Italia, has been unjustly forgotten.
How Silicon Valley is running the world, and destroying San Francisco.
We’re not moving toward a surveillance state; we live in the heart of one.
Some people like ideas, others like motion, some like one woman, others roam.
Tomas Hachard talks with the award-winning poet about 'border poetry,' cultural access, and the politics of writing about nature.
Poet Jaswinder Bolina discusses writing about race, the process of being translated, and more.
Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic yields an insight that’s fresher than “the banality of evil,” and just as true.
Oregon’s liberal mecca was made white by explicitly bigoted laws, and its hometown satire white-washes race relations.
You wondered out loud what writing “multiculturally” actually meant and what kind of black man would write the word “bro” in an email.
When I heard that Rodney King had died, two details in particular stuck out to me. One was that he died in a swimming pool. The other was that, earlier that day, somebody had heard him scream.
The activist academic on the prison industrial military complex and its impact on women of color.
Jamaica Kincaid on writing as transformation, “anger” versus truth, and those who think writers of color are “only entitled to write about the hardship of racism.”
The former Black Panther on coming of age in the party, ongoing police brutality, and her recent memoir turned novel, Virgin Soul.
Four painters on the complexities of categorization via nationality, race, and subject.
My mother’s mother used to say that it took four generations to get the black out.
What kind of person walks over the bones of slaves? / What kind of person is a slave to bones?
The teen crime ring that robbed Hollywood’s starlets, and the infinite media loops who love them.
Guernica's staff brings you their favorite writing on race, in America and beyond.
On being asked to speak for a whole community and region rather than yourself.
A new documentary on Indonesia’s 1965-66 anti-communist genocide is taking the international festival circuit by storm. But in the country that most needs to see it, the film is underground, its crew largely anonymous.
Creative resistance, via public art, in an age of pessimism and a city of commerce.
How the "bikelash" was overcome in New York and other cities.
Protestors in Istanbul are settling in to Gezi park, where the demonstrations across Turkey began.
President Obama, drone warfare, and the self-mystifying glories of American exceptionalism.
The latest victory in a long-standing push to deny cities the power to regulate guns.
The Poet’s Metaphor and the Styrofoaming of the Waters.
The artist’s new retrospective finds a midpoint between text and structure, narrative and image.
Looking back at Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Tom Wolfe, and the magazine that brought them all together.
Four writers on the gendered world of confessional writing, telling the truth about loved ones, and the line between bravery and betrayal.
Reading Gabriel García Márquez’s morbidity in the happiest country on earth.
The bestselling author of Wild on the Pacific Crest Trail, bringing consciousness to bear on the work, and how success has been met with a backlash.
The West Point grad turned anti-violence advocate on the havoc of trauma, the false security of war, and training peace activists to be more like soldiers.
Ma Bulpit said, “You’ll find it hard till you know the ropes. Those Lockharts… Australians mean well.”
When they finish, let them lob / the spent meat and mumped skin / like siege shot.
Not a word was uttered by an unknown man as he embraced an unknown twenty-year-old woman from behind on Boppstrasse.
Self-expression, self-promotion, and fan-participant culture via the divisive musician and artist of “asking.”
Vasily Grossman’s newly translated meditation on travel writing, Armenian Sketchbook, embraces the messy truth.
Whether they consider it a painful burden or a “release” of the body’s “energies,” some artists are painting their monthly period. Literally.
Inside the movement to bring the world thousands of tiny, crowd-sourced, community libraries.
The singer-songwriter talks with Dave Evans about her new label, the “protest album,” and her cats.
The new book by “class traitor” Robert Monks shows a system at its breaking point—and names the twenty-four Americans who can fix it.
How can you prove to the Syrian secret police that you’re not an Algerian spy?
The Guggenheim's current exhibition, No Country, challenges conceptions of modern Asian art.
Meditations on Jay G, Jay-Z, the art of plagiarism, and America’s love affair with money, guns, and decadence
The debut novelist on the Great Migration and nation-building, conflations of race and class, and her “belief in belief."
The award-winning novelist on the fluidity of sexuality, the intersections of art and selfishness, and her most recent book, The Woman Upstairs.
The discovery of a massive coal basin in Mozambique has kicked up a frenzy of investment, but this steroidal economy comes with a cost.
Bronx-born, Puerto Rican photographer Elle Pérez explores queer identity in rural Tennessee.
They are just everywhere, walking, rushing, running, toyi-toying, fists and machetes and knives and sticks and all sorts of weapons and the flags of the country in the air, Budapest quivering with the sound of their blazing voices: Kill the Boer, the farmer, the khiwa.
“Go home and pray to be forgiven,” she cried. “If you don’t pray now, you know what waits for you.”
When a chemical stick revealed that our little family was about to change, we were overjoyed. But not insured.
At an evening with the AAWW, the celebrated novelist shares thoughts on influence and identity, and offers advice to young writers
Keith Meatto talks with poet Gina Myers about leaving New York, darkness in poetry, and the difference between growing up and settling down.
Imperial gigantism and the decline of planet Earth.
Flash Fiction: If he feels pushed, he will turn into a bull, a storm.
You’ve never liked spring, as if its optimism, that sense of opportunity, is something you can never match.
From walking libraries and a god named “Word” to what Sherlock Holmes never said.
The American writer discusses turning his back on showy prose, being labelled an “erotic” author, and “the importance of being somebody.”
The activist and author reflects on childhood memories and the traffic of India’s Pink City.
The Pulitzer Prize winner on human rights work and playwriting, telling stories that are "profoundly unheard," and why she thinks a lot of writing about Africa amounts to little more than "pornography."
Guernica is now producing quarterly themed issues that follow our regular online format, but that are centered on explicit directions within the intersection of art and politics in which we've been working for the last eight years. Submissions welcome.
The mixed-material artist on the catharsis of Korean shamanism and why “the process of purification” is her natural subject matter.
Europe, the thought of Europe swelled over the horizon, like a giant dirigible, strung with lights in a dream of suspended power, but filled, in the dream, with a gas about to burst into flame.
My uncle never did a bad thing to anybody, but one day while he was on his front porch eating an ice cream cone, two men came upon him, pushed him inside, tied his hands and feet, robbed his house, and shot him in the head
Once the bone has been ground up, who, through muslin, would recognize her hand from a dog’s paw?
Flash Fiction: Dossier No. X recovered from Interrogation Cell B of Sala-XX
Guernica's staff recommends collections of stories, essays, poems, and more.
The author of Small Porcelain Head on how poetry can help us mourn.
Colson Whitehead on labels in literature, wearing genre drag, and getting lost in New York.
An artist catalogs usage of a versatile Egyptian swear.
Rick Warren exports American-style evangelism—and the gospel of adoption—to Rwanda.
Guernica has big plans for the rest of 2013 and beyond, and your support will be crucial as we invest in the next writers and artists who will challenge, inspire, and provoke you.
We're currently hiring interns for our editorial and publishing departments.
The author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine talks to Matthew McAlister about the publishing industry, narrative forms, and the nature of child stardom in the digital age.
The director of Which Way is the Front Line From Here? talks with Leah Carroll about his friend Tim Hetherington, the strange allure of war, and what it takes to document combat.
A profile of photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, whose exhibition A Haunted Capital is at the Brooklyn Museum through August.
In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, a columnist for Pakistan’s largest English newspaper reflects on why violent attacks leave a more lasting impression if they happen on American soil.
Flash Fiction: Her husband wants to know what she had in common with the Turkish sailor.
Wages keep dropping and government debt keeps growing. Simply arguing "more" won’t cut it.
Muriel Rukeyser’s lost novel and the recovery of work by women writers
The Guatemalan writer on his grandfather's escape from Auschwitz, translation as collaboration, and giving readers "the words they deserve.
On the origins of Zaytuna College, the United States’ first Muslim liberal arts institution, and the scholars and students who call it home.
The landscape architect on living cities, the tyranny of lawns, and how mayors will soon rule the world.
There is no such thing as an environmental refugee, yet displacement as the result of climate change is growing exponentially. A personal look at the crisis in East Africa.
The multiform artist creates mixed-material worlds from ceramics, drawing, and photography.
“Don’t worry, it will be okay, these things happen for a reason,” Ma Bille said. “As I always say: the worst thing to happen to you is for the best—”
Not much ever happened in Blaustein, but, even if it did, I would still remember the words she said, because it was the first time I’d heard them used, and their meaning, the parentheses they opened in my German existence every time someone used them, shocked me and made me feel like an intruder.
As part of our celebration of National Poetry Month, a conversation on Lynn Melnick’s collection If I Should Say I Have Hope.
Georges Simenon might be the best French-language novelist you've never heard of.
"We Went Back: Photographs from Europe, 1933 - 1956": Chim at the International Center of Photography
The veteran war reporter’s advice to young journalists on safety, story, five-sense reporting, and the uses of rumor.
And if so, is that terrible news?
Lashkar-e-Taiba is an institution well-embedded in Pakistani Society.
An evening with Guernica at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature.
Hockey’s toughest tradition is harder to support than ever.
Alexander Landfair talks with a poet equally enthusiastic about Wuthering Heights and Resident Evil.
To kick off National Poetry Month, the deputy director of the Poetry Society of America talks with Erica Wright about institutional rivalry, poetic diplomacy, and encountering verse in unlikely places.
For Sufi saint Amadu Bamba, labor was a path to enlightenment. For his followers, work is a kind of prayer. In Senegal, Sufism comes down from the clouds.
The cultural historian on the rhetoric of freedom, bossy white women, and the prospects of beating patriarchy by 2040.
The Booker Prize nominated novelist talks about his obsession with Pynchon, history as interference, & why literary fiction needn’t forsake the pleasures of suspense.
I thought about her son in Tehran and if he were still alive, what he would do to Sheila. Lying in bed, I replayed the scene from earlier that day and wished that I’d answered Sheila’s blows with punches of my own, wished that I’d defended Mrs. Azam.
I don’t want to have to get on any medicines, because as far as I’m concerned all shrinks are good for is getting you high.
Starve us, // stave off hyenas with our youth— / our muscle as protein, lion’s bait.
The liturgy of the lonely in the cruelest month.
As the Supreme Court prepares to conference on same-sex marriage, a phonebanker reflects on hip-hop lyrics, missionary work, and what a conversation has to do to change a mind.
Congress and the courts have reached conflicting decisions on wage rules and protections for vulnerable temporary workers; nobody knows what happens next.
A long-lived artists’ squat in Paris’s Twentieth Arrondissement on the eve of eviction.
In post-revolution Cairo, Nubians and other minority groups are being erased from the state-defined national identity. In Aswan, the view is different.
Reading Baratunde Thurston’s satirical memoir on public transportation turns into a social experiment.
A question for veterans that needs answering.
What Abigail Fisher’s affirmative action case is really about.
A look inside the courtroom on the opening day of Floyd v. NYC, the class-action lawsuit challenging the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy.
Welcome spring with this round of reading recommendations from the editors at Guernica.
The owner of a bookstore in Antalya, Turkey has more to offer than books.
Life in a Chinese artists’ colony through the eyes of the local taxi driver
The bestselling novelist talks about the art of optimism, gender bias in the literary world, and donning public personas.
Amitava Kumar and Teju Cole collaborate on an ekphrastic project exploring how Cole’s paired images intersect with the works of artists ranging from Sontag to Singh.
Letters from a quarter century of correspondence between the acclaimed American poet and the Swedish Nobel Prize winner.
The MacArthur "Genius" on willful delusions, the ego’s limit, and the stories we tell to make sense of experience.
The writer, art historian, and street photographer on the body vs. the intellect, the mythical pre-history of humanity, and how very serious a Twitter post can be.
Soon it was all they could do to keep these children from singeing the draperies or shattering the glass windowpanes with a single touch.
They arrived when the sea was swelling, threatening to sweep the old world back with it.
Under this desk I have hidden / for two months. I have tried / at shadowy. Have failed / at being wonderful.
...you can sleep without stretching your legs; / you can live never lifting your head.
Newly flush with oil cash, Kazakhstan makes Cosmopolitan its own—sort of.
There’s a framework for peace in Congo, and if Rwanda will stop interfering, it just might work.
An excerpt from the Egyptian novelist's prison journal, translated by Robyn Creswell.
The Paris Review editor on his new translation of That Smell by Sonallah Ibrahim.
What comes first, the middle class or the mall?
The rise and fall of Germany’s Pirate party casts doubt on a future of crowdsourced politics.
Investment in technology, unemployment, globalization, and the “Fed’s easy-money policies” all contribute to widening inequality.
An interview with the poet on his debut collection Charms Against Lightning.
Why it’s so tough to get your head around climate change.
One year later, the LRA leader is still at large—but the controversial viral video has changed America’s relationship to the International Criminal Court.
In Kenya, doctors are force-sterilizing HIV-positive women without their consent—and in some cases, without their knowledge.
The story behind a landmark case that transformed death penalty trials in the U.S.
The Nation columnist and law professor on dissent, privatization, and the future of racial equity.
Sarah Manguso on memory, mental illness and how writing “is like feeding the cassette tape through the machine one last time after it breaks”
On the evolution of Internet bullying, resilience of underdogs, and the promise of today’s teens.
In Malibu, there lived a beautiful old woman without a nervous system.
In the face of its stare, I stared back, and the bear slavered in response, shook its thick fur as welcome or warning. . .
Everyone’s face reminds me of a buried city, cars up on blocks leaning through // the slanted light (like jail cells)...
Imagine what George & Co. could have done with the internet. Or not.
Two figures challenge simple ways of thinking about slavery and agency.
For decades, straight white voters have over-stated their willingness to vote for black candidates and other “Others.” How the marriage equality debate and some statisticians may have vanquished the Bradley Effect.
Most drone strikes are directed at unidentified targets—not U.S. citizens or known Al Qaeda leaders—with murky justification.
What does the Southern Wild say about the tame north and the new New Orleans?
How do you solve a problem like Beyoncé? With her autobiography pic and some drag artists from the ’80s.
Waterboarding Americans and the Redefinition of Torture
In Mali’s fight against extremists, women’s freedoms—not Islam—is the central issue.
The impossible and necessary vision of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani
The public execution of two petty thieves sends a message to Tehran's artists and intellectuals. A dispatch from the gallows.
Matt Korvette of the punk band Pissed Jeans on pain, fashion fetishes, and redirecting the male gaze
The journalist and former sex worker on what feminists get wrong about prostitution.
The author, a self-titled “black feminist pornographer,” works to dismantle stereotypes one video at a time.
Melissa Febos on her dominatrix memoir, teaching sexuality in literature, and what it takes to make a great sex scene.
Jonny Negron speaks about drawing characters of eroticism, mythology, and contemporary fashion.
“These infidels cannot insult us like this. If you have the courage, come and face us out in the open. You cannot tie down a speechless animal and think you have beaten us..."
I don’t like the box they have put Papa in; I would have gotten him the fancy kind with polished wood and golden handles.
...their sleeping, their dormancy, / how it stirred in me a hunger / black as a pocked tooth.
Some stories of love, passion, and sex to get you through the winter.
Curiosity, power, and uncertainty in the human experiment of egg donation.
Experts weigh in on the transparency gains of the last four years and what's in store in the next four.
The court's review of a key concept used to enforce the 1968 Fair Housing Act could be a major setback for housing rights advocates.
Your right to swing your fist in religious practice ends when your fist reaches my nose, or uterus.
What Milwaukee, home of the nation’s oldest school voucher system, can teach us about desegregation, measuring school success, and decoding the rhetoric of “school choice.”
In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, the poet-reporter bears witness to resilience on Japan’s tsunami-ravaged Tohoku coast.
Washington’s dilemma on a 'lost' planet.
Population growth during Laurie Anderson’s lifetime
The best minds of a generation captured on a thirteen-dollar Kodak Retina.
The co-founder of Digital Democracy on how activists can use technology to respond to problems—from natural disasters to violence against women.
Major Avtar Singh of the Indian Army’s counterinsurgency in Kashmir killed dozens. India refused to punish him. So did Canada and the U.S., where he killed his family and committed suicide.
The provocateur on Obama’s second term and the role of bad behavior in fiction.
Adam Lanza may have had Asperger's, a condition our author lives with. Marginalizing him—whether he’s 'one of us' or not—only further compounds the tragedy.
Her name tag said 'Lynn Paltrow: Reproductive Justice.' Pulling out a sharpie, she added, 'And Drugs.'
The journalist and "accidental theologist" discusses distinguishing human from legend in her latest book on the founder of Islam.
They stride through the woods and shout. They practice propping guns on their shoulders and breaking them in half so the empty shells tumble to the ground.
She is knee-sick and fawning on her felt-tipped prize / for exceeding her bones in the sprinting test.
Eventually, I married a man more than twice my size. He terrified me. Making love felt like getting run over
Oftentimes the bourbon distilleries in this land I’ve pitched / my tent in under-distribute for what I have in mind.
Some 40 miles from Rome stands one of the best-preserved examples of fascist architecture in Europe—a town built at lightning speed on Mussolini’s orders and admired by Le Corbusier.
Will DOMA and Prop 8 go the way of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law? A look at the face of marriage equality in 1967 and today.
Pankaj Mishra’s new book, From the Ruins of Empire: The intellectuals who remade Asia, has one eye on the history of the East and one eye on its future.
I looked at real estate in cities I'd never been to, just in case.
The deadline for submissions is January 31.
A video artist draws on news footage, historical videos, Fela Kuti, Slavoj Žižek, Lewis Carroll, and others to reflect on Tahrir Square two years after #Jan25.
Reed Cooley speaks with the artist on his recent exhibition at Haunch of Venison’s Chelsea gallery.
Violence against women is rampant, systemic, and all about control.
In Guatanamo: If the Light Goes Out, a photographer explores life in, around, and after detainment.
Holiday celebrations in a Yemeni village defy the country’s reputation.
Our investigation of the most popular trend in 'vaginal rejuvenation' continues.
An investigation of the most popular trend in the field of 'vaginal rejuvenation' surgery.
Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst is missing something.
American courts recognize rights to refuse life-saving treatment. So why won’t the State of Connecticut let William Coleman die?
One of TIME and Newsweek’s most influential people of 2012, Ai-jen Poo works to address a swiftly aging population, and an exploited workforce, by reforming domestic labor standards.
Recently unearthed documents and testimony reveal that the U.S.’s war crimes in Vietnam were far more widespread—and egregious—than previously known.
As the disappeared from the Kurdish-Turkish conflict are unearthed from unmarked graves, will the government help deliver justice?
The data journalist and designer on the balance between content and beauty
Jacolby Satterwhite on rendering his mother's drawings into worlds of their own.
According to Cornish, the pool, an infinity pool, would be able to recreate the event of Africa sinking into the sea.
When my arms first grew firm I began to trust / myself to love someone outside my family.
I carried a machine on my back / from a tundra to a new northwest.
Following the third anniversary of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, Alexia Nader speaks with Wilentz about her new book, and the culture and future of Haiti.
The Mary Ryan Gallery features the work of artist and radical Hugo Gellert.
Growing up in Kashmir, in proximity to death.
Water scarcity and local action in the pueblos jóvenes of Peru.
Increasingly frequent disasters like Hurricane Sandy and Typhoon Bopha raise the question of global sharing.
Why climate change won't wait for the president.
Amid violence and devastation, a thriving, transgressive music.
From the CIA’s hunt for Bin Laden to an East German doctor’s search for an escape, 2012 was an excellent year in film.
Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection
In an adapted vignette from the author's new book, Standing Still in a Concrete Jungle, a surreal afternoon at a Wall Street lunch spot.
Inside the community of Damanhur, where devotees safeguard connections to the stars, study alchemy, and prepare to rebuild human civilization.
Flash Fiction: But I have had the feeling for awhile that the end of the world isn’t necessarily a large tidal wave that will wipe out the entirety of the United States, or a huge volcanic eruption, but that the end of the world could be any day for anyone.
Flash Fiction: Here, we pass from time to time and nod. It’s so hard to hold on.
One of the world’s leading climate activists on the science of dangerous weather, the imperative to organize, and how to get out of bed in the morning on a planet in peril.
Aerial photos from Greenland take climate change out of the realm of abstraction.
A cartoon history of End Times that weren't.
Russia doesn’t get extinguished. No, Russia is the one that extinguishes. Russia is the prophecy. It had certainly ended my world, several times over.
Flash Fiction: “Look for the swollen ones,” his mother said. “They said he drowned.”
Sure, forced abortions are oppressive, but so is not being able to breathe.
The founders of Ecosocialist Horizons discuss climate change, the collapse of capitalism, and building a new world in the shell of the old.
In her last book, one of the country’s great thinkers lost her edge. Why the decline evidenced in Dark Age Ahead is about more than just Jacobs’s age.
Flash Fiction: And despite her outward nonchalance, after Wyatt was born, when all she had at stake multiplied exponentially, she had come to see that terrible things – the witches and boogey men and homicidal maniacs of her anxiety-damp childhood – could, and did, happen during the day.
(re:)FORM Art founder Anna Harrah talks with us about collaboration, apocalypse, and self-fulfilling prophesies.
Flash Fiction: Sweet body, forgive me. I bore you so many petty hatreds—Ugly, I said. Dirty and weak. And yet, here is death, making such brief beauty of you.
From snowpocalypse to foie-mageddon, what’s behind our new obsession with end-times word endings?"
We don’t have to imagine what a nation cleansed of guns would look like—plenty of other countries can show us. One writer recalls her year in gun-less South Korea.
During this time the weather changed and the voice on the radio brought uneasy news about barricades, policemen, and tear gas in the city.
From a speech at the Earth at Risk conference, Roy on the misuses of democracy and the revolutionary power of exclusion.
The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize winner on her debut dystopian novel and the role of American fiction in the face of escalating violence.
After a decade of absence, the Mexican-American author and activist returns to the literary scene to discuss her new book, what it takes to 'compost' grief into light, and the long road for writers of color.
On the idea of End Times: clearing up that Mayan apocalypse business, remembering some failed armageddons throughout history, and visiting with folks who are still waiting patiently.
The professor and critic turns to technology explosions past—think typewriters, gramophones, and radios—to map the modern intersections of information and art.
Alarmed to the eviction in advance, photographers Matt Lutton and Darko Stanimirovic distributed disposable cameras so that the residents could document their own dispossession.
we talk about getting another widow / for her to putter with
A young writer learns to be alone in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
The staff's favorite independent booksellers offer their own December recommendations.
On how a sense of “disquiet” can enrich American fiction, and why traveling is like taking acid.
How U.S. taxpayers are paying the Pentagon to occupy the planet.
Anti-austerity protests in Portugal highlight a complex culture, at once nativist and transnational.
Two women bridge the military-civilian gap to talk about machine guns and womanliness, dealing with trauma, and breaking old rules.
Ki-Suck Han's death on a New York City subway track has the city asking what would I do? One writer examines death in public, how the MTA handles trauma, and what it feels like to be an onlooker.
Getting the commons into school curriculum will help students understand climate change (and a lot more).
An outsider works to restore an abandoned chateau in historic Burgundy.
An antique weapons dealer in Kabul collects Kalashnikovs and nostalgia.
The poet C.D. Wright discusses book-length works, the political in art, and more.
How American Indian identity is reflected in pop culture.
The 5-Under-35 author on growing up in the Mojave, busting up the lines between fiction and nonfiction, and braving her way into the dark heart of the West’s discarded stories.
From electronic surveillance to drone strikes to racial disparities in the criminal justice system, the writer, lawyer, and advocate anticipates the most pressing issues of the next four years.
Human rights abusers who help stop climate change, and the global system that keeps them in business
Names hold culture and history. They defend or surrender their bearer to the prejudices of the world. So what does it mean when your name doesn’t mean anything?
Taken as a whole, no one who read the screenplay for Who We Are denied that it was clever in its composition, original in its pattern, and ruthlessly unsentimental in its conclusions. It was also “a bit portentous,” according to Sam’s father, Booth Dolan, the B-movie mainstay famous for his stentorian, blink-free performances. . .
David Joselit theorizes about the function of art in the global age of abstracted value and Art Basel
He takes her hand, careful to keep his eyes away from her dominant breasts, her full pouty lips, and they begin in the living room.
in the outskirts of Lisbon, the Afrikander, / builds a bone temple for all the lads
This fear-mongering won't help anything. It's time to jump.
McEwan's new novel raises questions of artistic independence.
"Toxic Beauty," a retrospective at NYU’s Grey Gallery, brings together the writing and visual work of an extraordinarily socially engaged artist.
The fantasy of girl-on-girl violence underlying the Petraeus scandal.
Guernica's staff on the books they'll remember this Thanksgiving.
The award-winning author on why he loves to write fiction and talk politics, and how nationalism fuels climate change.
A timely reminder of the consequences of treating corporations as people.
Recent Islamist politics have turned the holy month of Muharram into a time of battle. Facing mounting violence, Karachi enters the Muslim year 1434 as a city under siege.
Concerns over declining 'civility' in politics distract us from the meaningful disagreements that we need to have.
The United States is in the midst of a tremendous building spree, but it isn't happening in America.
Returning to Spain, a journalist and critic maps responses to the economic crisis and its historical points of origin.
After spurring an investigation of internal violence in the armed forces, the journalist explores the same themes through fiction.
A new documentary reveals the beauty and horror of plastic waste
A.M. Homes on Nixon’s psyche, American dementia, and writing like a man.
Guernica’s art editor, Noah Rabinowitz, and photographer John Francis Peters discuss what they saw while working on and off assignment in the days after Hurricane Sandy.
Winona eyed Frank down the long black barrels of the shotgun. She complained again about that whore he’d visited every Wednesday for fourteen years, before he lost his manhood in the accident at the rebar factory.
There was something fascinating about images of unknown semi-naked women; I wondered if there were newspapers filled with images of semi-naked men.
Wet pets lounge out in the trees, all the abandoned bits / children leave, beyond what the self wants (to be bigger, / less attached).
Six feet tall and arms like bundled wire. He go strutting the length of the house.
I have written this poem on the theme “To the post-3.11 world, as I see it,” but this is just the prelude.
To get Internet access in my apartment I had to give up my legal rights.
You probably did too.
The info-sharing of early arcade game enthusiasts mimicked the scientific method. Now, video games and collective intelligence could change the way we approach science, shared problems, and school.
Natasha Lewis speaks with Strike Debt member, professor, and author Andrew Ross.
The Baghdad International Film Festival is part of a larger effort to bring the arts back to Iraq’s once-flourishing capital.
A massive collection of pre-digital photography shows a nation in transition—and manages bring Facebook-level connectivity into a gallery space.
Young Lagosian photographers examine the corners of their city that often go unseen.
A month-long photography festival aims to capture the spirit of one of Africa’s biggest and busiest cities.
Those in favor of ending capital punishment in California have dramatically outspent their opponents and gathered celebrity endorsements from Joan Baez to Bill O’Reilly, but the race is too close to call. How one notorious criminal might swing the vote on Prop 34.
In the wake of the election of Barack Obama, a writer explores black American identity and the ritual of return in Ghana.
Ballot initiatives in Florida are bringing God into politics.
In the aftermath of Sandy, it's time to reevaluate what it means to be dependent on government.
Reflections on a postcard from David Foster Wallace
The MacArthur “Genius” on his forthcoming sci-fi epic, Monstro, and the evolution of his wily main character, Yunior.
The natural world reveals mirth, mystery, and what we mean by “home.”
. . .I looked down at Omar’s pants to tear off his belt and realized that we were shrouded in such darkness, I couldn't see the buckle.
Notes on names Boy gets called at school: fudge packer, pansy, fairy, pillow biter, cock gobbler.
Jimmy Nolan has a thing for broads—loud, brassy women who sit with their legs open and drink beer straight from the bottle—women who always say exactly what they’re thinking and for better or worse, mean what they say.
I would make, / it occurs to me one / sun-smeared evening after too much vodka, not / a bad Aztec.
Tonight’s theme is: you are a baby nihilist.
The broad strokes of Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood and the subtle specificity of Joan Didion’s Miami.
Our political language is in desperate need of a change.
Dear progressives: You may think there's not a huge difference between Obama and Romney. But there is, and you should still vote.
The new graphic novel Building Stories plays with time, form, and the physicality of the book.
Writers, editors, and translators gather to remember Hitchens, honor culture, and experience elephant happiness.
This year's presidential campaign is bigger and louder than anything we've ever seen before.
In last night's debate, Obama made his dominance clear.
Bestiaire’s place in the filmmaker’s oeuvre and anthropomorphic conceptions.
Artist Anita Glesta’s Gernika/Guernica: Desde el Cielo Hasta el Fondo (from the Heavens to the Core).
On girls, shame, healing what’s broken, and why education is the path to creating an honorable Pakistan.
The proprietor of Mexico City’s first American-style bar reflects on how history and politics have changed the ways the city indulges, and what this means for his neighborhood.
A photographer explores an accidental sea in the desert, and a romance—both very much in flux—and returns with this meditation on transformation, control, and the truths we can learn from geology.
A visit with the curator of “Rise and Fall of Apartheid” shows how photographers revealed South Africans’ struggles to the world.
The Cuban Missile Crisis and ownership of the world.
In an excerpt from his long-awaited memoir, the inventor of the post-colonial African novel in English discusses his origins as a writer and the seeds of revolt against the British Empire.
Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and former White Stripe Jack White on what’s killing the humanity of performances, how the wrong teacher can “really mess you up,” and the power of the blues.
The famed writer on life as Joseph Anton, the problems of free speech, and the importance of telling the ‘goddamn truth’.
Occupy Wall Street staged a rebellion against corporate corruption and economic inequality in Manhattan’s parks and streets, but the battle for the city began with nineteenth century electrification of Broadway.
Climate change activism collides with indigenous land movements in Mexico’s Zapatista heartland, where the interests of a green economy threaten to crowd out the voices of those for whom it matters.
Seventeen years after the Yugoslav wars, large swaths of land in Bosnia are still riddled with active land mines.
I’ve seen him before, crawling / under church pews, tying // parishioners’ shoes together.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s installation combines searchlights, cityscapes, and crowd-sourced voices, challenging the way we conceive of participatory art.
Young people are making a difference in the cities they call home.
The prolific translator talks with Guernica’s poetry editor about her work ethic, contemporary Morocco, and what connects poetry with journalism.
Forecasts of oil abundance collide with planetary realities.
Banned Books: The acclaimed author speaks about what motivates his censors, self-censorship, and the value of stories.
Bulgakov's masterpiece remains a reminder that you can't fight fire with fire.
The scientific community is largely united on the dangers of climate change, so why is no one listening?
Banned Books Week: Though Miller defeated censorship, his work was misunderstood and cartoonishly simplified
Banned Books Week: The celebrated and banned children’s book author speaks with us about the fears of censors, the deaths of children, and what we need to risk for literature.
Banned Books Week: The author of The Color Purple (and one of America’s most censured writers) tells Megan Labrise about finding wisdom in the songs of ancestors, why her acclaimed novel won’t be translated into Hebrew, and approaching writing in a priestly state of mind.
Political theorist Jodi Dean probes the contradictions and traps of nonstop information.
To find out how fast, and how much, polar ice might melt in the future, scientists are looking to ancient rocks for clues of what happened in the past.
Aman Sethi consults a troubled storyteller about the terrifying urban legends proliferating among Delhi's displaced urban poor.
Kelly K. Jones’s work explores the boundary between documentary and conceptual ways of image making.
First, it was his hands. Three days after he announced that he was going to leave me, I watched him drinking his coffee and noticed how his three middle fingers were slipped through the handle, gripping the body of the mug in a confident, almost loving way.
A tale crashing in the glass garden
What was I going to do when I saw her? It was a question I had asked myself a thousand times. Slap her? Scream insults? Demand she give my husband back?
Next Week, the Guernica Daily will feature interviews and essays in support of free thinking, reading, and writing.
The author talks with Natasha Lewis about his new book Subversives: the FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power.
A look inside Pamela Geller’s 9/11 "Stop Islamization of Nations" conference reveals apocalyptic language, racial paranoia, and surprising links to the political mainstream.
Forget Mitt Romney, can the president make it to November 7?
Can we balance free speech and privacy with basic decency in online communities?
The evolving field of ecopsychology aims to cure what ails us by bridging the human-nature rift.
This Thursday, brave the beautiful autumn weather to hear the poets featured in the 25th edition of The Best American Poetry read their work.
Doug Saunders's new book fights fears about “the Islamization of America” with historical and sociological fact, but slippery terminology gets in the way.
Artist Chad Wys gives us a peek into the music he listens to while he works.
It's the first anniversary of the Occupy movement, and there is much to look forward to.
Pulitzer Prize winner David Shipler on why bad guys deserve rights, how small-town officials wield big-time power, and why Obama has been bad for the Constitution.
My mother needs her loom, and my father wants a wood shop. What do Baby Boomers consider before they sign away their worldly wealth?
Hanna Rosin’s controversial new book proclaims the "end of men." But what about the women?
In an excerpt from his upcoming book, Robert O. Self shows how the antirape movement in the 1970s inspired legislative reform, workplace shifts--and a rift across race and class
Equipped with a mirror, painter's easel, a camera, and his formal training in biology, scientist-turned-artist Daniel Kukla explores where the low Sonoran Desert meets the high Mojave.
His first conscious memory, from the time he was three, was the feel of a rat snake slithering through his hands.
When did the Berlin Zoo stop displaying humans? 1931, I think, but I’m not sure.
War has become a sort of American monopoly--but the American people don't seem to know, or care.
As negotiations between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union continue, one teacher tells her school's strike story in pictures.
Newly minted Oxford American editor Roger D. Hodge discusses the role of an editor, finding a form, and the newsstand's allure.
Our editors highlight some worthy books to start off the fall.
What the all-you-can-eat buffet tells us about misguided nostalgia, overcoming privation, and the RNC.
In the wake of New York Fashion Week, former model Jennifer Sky calls for the inclusion of models in the SAG-AFTRA union and an end to the exploitation of underage workers.
Despite what Kakutani says, Smith’s new novel is not "Mrs. Dalloway Lite."
In Berlin, the photographer’s fascination with separation and unity has unexpected resonance.
With penalties laughably low, what should we expect but continued criminal activity on the part of corporations?
Sonia Gandhi and Aung San Suu Kyi have overcome tragic and arduous pasts to emerge as leaders of India and Burma. What’s next for these two historical icons?
Isolated for one night in a boat overlooking the Thames, Geoff Dyer explores representations of reality through the lens of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
As we grapple with the legal, political, and cultural implications of drone warfare and targeted killing, the renowned anthropologist draws on an older turning point in military ethics—weapons design at Los Alamos.
Following three years of research in an Indian slum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist discusses what language can’t express, her view that nobody is representative, and the ethical dilemmas of writing about the poor.
Avoiding the simplistic narratives of Afro-pessimism and Afro-optimism, photographer Peter diCampo uses photo-apps to represent everyday Africa.
If you must travel, travel by Amtrak. Trains are safe, buses are not. I mean safe from raids by the INS.
Seven months into her husband’s depression, Diane called the church secretary. She wanted the elders to come over and anoint Mitch with oil.
I wish there were simpler words for this—to reach a point zero or the limit, to write: "It was so hard without you."
Income inequality is one of the most pressing issues facing the country, but you wouldn't know it from watching the RNC in Tampa.
Back from Iraq, a veteran meditates on the past, present, and future of American warfare, and the small creek in Virginia where they all flow together.
London won its Olympic bid based on a promise to reinvigorate the nation’s interest in sport—now, after the Games, Parliament has to deliver the funds
How an American disaster paved the way for Big Oil's rise—and possible fall—in Iraq.
The director of the Arab Association of New York talks with Meaghan Winter about mosque monitoring, civil liberties, and kids asking 'why do they hate us?'
Todd Akin's comments highlight the danger of letting ideology create facts instead of the other way around.
In response to the Wisconsin and Aurora shootings, a writer reflects on communal responsibility, gun violence, and American understandings of difference.
Before there was mansplaining, there was Rebecca Solnit's 2008 critique of male arrogance. Reprinted here with a new introduction.
A decade after John Reed's Orwell parody was released, it still feels current, and, perhaps, even more relevant than before.
Is Ramallah’s economic boom a sign of progress or surrender?
Residents of the Gaza Strip are restricted in their movements, in what they can bring into and send out of their land, even how far off their shores they can fish. Words, though, know no borders.
A Bosnian genocide survivor and a human rights journalist confront terror, loss, and what it takes to heal.
Riches beckon from beneath Haiti’s hills, and mining companies are hoping to lock in huge tax breaks to get at them.
The iconoclastic leftist and novelist discusses the rage that fueled him, and how he felt about his coming end alongside the ruin of America.
Daniel Shea's series “Blisner, Ill.” portrays the crises of titanic mythologies.
This story can’t get it’s tense together or it’s person, now. Has it even got its "its" right?
Trying to make sense of sacrifice is like watching / gravediggers bury something in the shade of trees.
But the girl is still asleep. Perhaps, thinks the prince, he kissed her too lightly. He stoops down again and kisses her a second time, this time a touch more vigorously.
Instead of using her closing statement to express remorse, Yekaterina Samutsevich of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot talked about Putin, power, and the subversive potential of images.
The rush to mine Canada’s bitumen deposits has created modern-day boomtowns. This summer one of them lost its oldest bar.
After Sunday's shootings, Sikh Americans in Milwaukee and elsewhere need and deserve an informed response.
Remembering a critic who knew there was good art and bad art, and wanted us to know the difference.
Character study vs. flimsy romance in Fifty Shades of Grey, Trishna,and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Writer and former radical bookstore owner Sean Stewart talks about his new book on the underground press that was so vital to '60s counterculture.
As Islamists across the Arab World continue to enshrine sharî’a concepts in their constitutions, noted academic Tariq Ramadan asks, are other alternatives available?
China’s voracious appetite for resources isn’t something to be feared—it should be emulated.
An exhaustive new biography of Brautigan will change the way we remember the poet and novelist.
Israeli-born sculptor Tomer Sapir—a “crypto-taxidermist” of creatures that have never walked this earth—surveys the borderlands of technology and nightmare.
I stare at the ground imagining I am one of the condemned, what it felt like to have my fingernails torn off. I clench my fists tight and brace myself for the pain, wishing I was off this wretched island, wishing I was home.
Underneath the carnival, on a city pier skirted / In paper dragons, a slow pack, ever indistinct, scavenges a / Great cadaver
Cambodia’s temples—Angkor Wat, Pre Rup, and Beng Maelea—invite reflections on land mines, Buddhism, and photography.
The Aurora shooting gets the attention, but guns are going off everywhere.
At the Joan B Mirviss Gallery’s The French Connection, Japanese women ceramists breathe new life and a welcome strangeness into a traditional artform.
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is now as notorious for his political actions as for his work. Alison Klayman's new documentary, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, shows that his originality comes precisely from combining the two.
Calls for a Western intervention in northern Mali, now being called “Africa’s Afghanistan,” rely on logical fallacies and ignore recent history.
Can we afford to be this cynical?
A month on a Grand Jury reveals what happens when guns are cheap and easy to come by.
Leigh Stein's new collection is captivating even for the most ardent of poetry-haters.
Our editors highlight some worthy books to fill what remains of summer.
What the top-down planning of the games will bring to East London: dispersal zones, rooftop missiles, and a giant shopping mall.
As Egypt’s first civilian president assumes his role, it’s unclear how much political power the nation’s generals will wield.
Outsourcing isn't our problem, it's that the needs of American businesses are disconnected from the needs of Americans.
When confronted with homelessness, it's much too easy to look the other way.
In his new memoir Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, the king of R&B reminisces about busking and childhood tragedy, and explains why he is always gonna keep lovin’ on you.
How Berlin's past shapes its present and future as an artist base.
The two visual artists on the gravitas needed to make protest art, the rhetoric and representations of the Occupy movement, and how to seduce an audience by grabbing them by the eyeballs.
Before Wounded Knee, Native tribes following an apocalyptic prophet created a new dance that would, they hoped, rid the world of white people.
Documentarian Annie Eastman tells the stories of families in Salvador’s palafitas—water slums built on piles of garbage—and confronts her outsider status.
After losing his companion Peter Hujar to AIDS, artist and activist David Wojnarowicz attempts to film grief while wrestling with his own mortality.
Unwrapping the history of Mexico's real national snack uncovers classism, dynamite, and shifting definitions of culture.
After my parents were divorced I fell in love with the ugliest girl in my white high school. This was what I believed—the love part, I mean; the ugly part was true.
I was born in the first century of guilt.
Secret wars, secret bases, and the Pentagon’s “new spice route” in Africa.
The author's Antigonick is an affecting interpretation of Sophocles' classic.
The documentary Girl Model shows how the industry that promises young models financial freedom instead lands them in debt to their agencies.
As narcotraficantes terrorize Mexico with surreal acts of violence, it's time to reconsider our basic assumptions about the U.S. War on Drugs.
There's the media portraying President Obama's tax proposal, and then there's the real thing.
A Lakota man from the Cheyenne River Reservation went to Rapid City for heart surgery and came back with Klan insignia carved into his chest.
Photos of empty performance spaces in Lagos capture the spirit of Fela Kuti's famous nightclub and strip back the chaos of one of the world's busiest cities.
Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap explores hip hop’s past but skims over important questions about its present.
Oana Sanziana Marian talks with the pioneering director about how a plagiarism scandal and an arts-organization takeover sparked a clash in Romanian politics—and how it may lead to reform.
A writer raised on feminist fairy tales reflects on Brave and Bloody and having it all.
The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare obscures the ruling’s other, deeply conservative result: a road-map for gutting Congressional power.
In the 40Owls Gallery's "Distinct Ethnic Magical Tales" exhibition, artists explore colonization, pop cultural iconography, and cultural ownership
In an excerpt from his posthumous graphic memoir, Pekar contends with his identity and the Jewish state.
Jabati Mambu, a Sierra Leonean severely wounded in the civil war, watches as the Hague hands down a war crimes verdict.
In its bank crisis as well as its sex abuse scandals, the Catholic Church is defined by an astonishing lack of accountability. Is this why a parish per week closes in the United States?
The sign pointing visitors to London’s 2012 Olympic Site could just as easily read “Dystopia For Rent.”
I thought of zooaphilia: woman who married / a bear, a frog, a swan, who fed a cobra milk / and then fell in love.
Exploring minority religions in Poland, Katarzyna Majak’s images probe prejudice against witchery, questions of aging, and feminine divinity.
American Nurse became our possession, the Party headquarters in Beijing told us, for only a week before Deng decided what to do with her
In the afterglow of her Pulitzer win, the feminist playwright opens up about border-crossing, why she’d make a terrible critic, and her master teacher, Paula Vogel.
In an-Najaf, I watched a man’s wound / flitter off his skin, knowing he’d died / two days prior
What can we learn about Cuba from zombie movies and escape ploys?
Mai Iskander, director of Words of Witness, talks with Ela Bittencourt about the reporting/activism dilemma, Egypt’s disappeared, and the rule of law under Morsi.
Banks don't want Dodd-Frank regulations extended to their foreign branches and overseas subsidiaries. Should we listen?
The documentary Marina Abramovic The Artist Is Present gives an inside look at the artist’s discipline, creative process, and love story.
A theater collection of teenage girls takes on child sex trafficking, and the challenges of portraying exploitation in art.
Obama's "new" Africa policy prioritizes security over democracy. But the continent is changing rapidly, and U.S. policy needs to adapt--here's why.
In a series of watercolors, Anna Ludwig explores the complicated history of People’s Park, and sees its echoes in Occupy Oakland.
Christine Lee Zilka interviews Don Lee, author of the new novel The Collective, about cover-art Orientalism, character heritage, and the improbability of becoming a writer.
Mitch McConnell takes the corporations-are-people ethos to a new level. Now, corporations can do more than speak—they can feel.
The ascension of science in so many facets of our everyday lives has not sparked a revitalization of belief in the power of reason.
Anthony D'Aries explores father, culture, and war in his new book Language of Men.
The scariest movies of the summer are at the Human Rights Watch film festival.
Civilian soldiers, drones, and cyber attacks are just a few elements of the Obama formula for contemporary war.
The scholarly press that brought us the collected Langston Hughes and other leading Civil-rights-era thinkers will be "phased out" starting June 30th.
What happens to traditional culture when an isolated town in the Caucasus is reshaped in the image of a Western tourism center?
How long will it take before our dreams / Fill again with varieties of fallen bodies?
What Martha Gellhorn teaches us about the morality of contemporary war reportage
A conversation recorded on the road reveals the late author’s take on the role of the writer-as-activist. Read and listen.
Anthony Swofford on bad habits, good writing, and coming back from the brink
His father is more than twice her age but her eyes are pinned to his lips as he speaks to her in his fur-lined baritone.
Photographer Julien Chatelin’s images capture Egypt’s surreal and absurd rural landscape; a road that leads to nowhere.
Banned in China and avoided by the American media, the Falun Gong movement turns twenty.
An old wives’ tale returns, revealing post-war Sri Lanka.
Guernica Editor in Chief Joel Whitney tracked down Noam Chomsky to get his opinion on the President's recently revealed 'kill list.'
A new exhibit uses newspapers as instruments of art and manipulation, and shows that in our media, there is no escaping murder and mayhem.
A London artist explores third-sex identity through pop culture icons from Michael Jackson to Margaret Thatcher.
A fabulist film highlights the absurdity of breakneck-paced development, and its relevance inside and outside of China.
Despite a recent loss at the ballot box, the fight is far from over for unions in Wisconsin.
Less than half of Americans believe that the Supreme Court is doing a good job. Here's what that may mean.
Haniya Rae interviews Jessica Porter on the process of curating artist Katarzyna Majak's new photography exhibition, 'Women of Power.'
Scott Walker is the first American governor to survive a recall election. It wasn't just about the money.
An unprecedented expansion of authority has created a new role for the president: Assassin-in-Chief.
A year after the Arab Spring, Egyptian voters must choose between a Mubarak minister and a Muslim Brotherhood candidate. How did we get from Tahrir Square to here?
Memories of director Seyfi Teoman, whose two feature films drove Turkish film for two decades.
The Secondary Disciplinarian: a monster dropped / from a husband’s dream
The literary legend on his new book of poetry, about a personal evolution, and those he's published; MFA's and prizes; and the ongoing river of language.
How Texas managed to export its energy policy to the rest of America.
He’s mopping at his pelvis with a wadded-up tissue, and then he’s mopping her up as well. Already the backs of her thighs are caking up.
The Bolivian writer Juan Claudio Lechín on the conditions that predicate fascism and the morality of anarchism.
Protests at the Chicago NATO Summit get ugly... 1968-National-Democratic-Convention ugly.
A new book reveals the hidden physical infrastructure of the internet.
Dissident Wuer Kaixi talks about fellow activist Chen Guangcheng, his own attempt to return to China, and his continued hope for “counter-talk” with the regime that exiled him.
The book New Jack: Guarding Sing Sing, has been banned at that prison since its publication, and so has its author—until now.
Egypt's presidential election is a tremendous opportunity for the Egyptian people, but does not come without risks.
With surveillance cameras on every corner and our smartphones tracking our every move, we've entered a new era of the war on civilian privacy.
The government spends a great deal of money on programs and services for the benefit of the poor. So why is it also, in tandem with corporations, robbing them blind?
Kelly Reichardt's Oregon Trilogy, screening at the Whitney's Biennial, explores the thin lines between hope and loss, sorrow and joy, the America we've got and the one we could have had.
The Cannes Jury Prize-winning film Polisse has striking similarities to Law & Order.
On how far we should go to stand up for ourselves, the righteous anger of parenthood, and whether "faggot" is the ultimate insult.
Sebastian Black and Cole Sayer discuss CGI, the NFL, and the mythology surrounding being a painter.
South Africa's Pieter Hugo on negotiating representations of Africa, the searing controversy surrounding his work, Nick Cave, and his friend the late Tim Hetherington.
With foreign companies amassing higher stakes and a greater presence in the Iraqi oil business, Greg Muttitt traces the rise of Production Sharing
Agreements (PSAs) and its effects on Iraqi sovereignty.
The fishmonger of me // walks home with a little fish a little empty, / but the next life will be landlocked
Author Misha Glenny discusses the escalating danger of cyber-crime, its impact on civil liberties, and why hackers should be nurtured for their creativity and skills.
We didn’t have any bears and so drew straws / to dress up in the bear-suit and stand, vinyl-fanged // jaws agape in the hotel lobby.
Painter Sangram Majumdar invites Guernica to his studio to view a few in-progress paintings and learn about his process.
Honduran President Pepe Lobo received an International Leadership Award last week from the U.S. Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute. But why?
I imagine what Janneke and Karin would say if they saw us together: Oh, she’s lost it now.
He liked how her odd mouth conjured surprise like a jack in the box. She liked how he used his bathtub as a closet.
When writer Rivka Galchen and neuroscientist David Linden get together, the boundaries of science, emotion, and memory blur.
Watergate led to a grassroots effort to clean up Washington. In the wake of Citizens United, and with the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal, is it time to act again?
'Murder is My Business,' an exhibition of Weegee's gritty photographs, opens at the International Center for Photography.
Peter Hoffman documents an Illinois home that helps refugees take the next step towards establishing a stable new life in the U.S.
It's a bad idea to enact cuts in government spending right when consumers can't spend more.
Larry Abramson reflects on Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and the upcoming 45th anniversary of the Six-Day War.
Sending debt oeonage, poverty, and freaky weather into the arena.
Before Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, he was locked in a house for five months with three wives and over a dozen children.
Haniya Ray interviews the Critical Mass agitator and artist.
Can Liberia's celebrated president win the trust of her people?
Michael Sandel on a society where everything could be up for sale.
Rebecca Solnit and David Graeber on anarchism as a problem-solving tool, the return of debtors' prisons, and why communism is ingrained in capitalism
Sadakat Kadri on Muslim and Western ignorance of what Shari'a law really means--and the real concerns that should be targeted.
Today's art world, like the realm of finance, is a place of stock and shareholders.
The Hungarian writer talks terror in fiction, the aesthetic of the long sentence, his love of contemporary music, and collaborating with Allen Ginsberg.
Ah, to be at the center of the world! How Gerard Mercator changed history by creating the first useful map.
Tom Bissell talks about the blurred line between fiction and non-fiction, ridding the world of mediocre writing, and Tommy Wiseau of The Room.
Our economy’s death cycle has a very famous historical parallel: the lead-up to the French revolution.
Lessons about the military, war, and revolutionary armed forces learned from a week in a Colombian peace community.
"The Island President," a new film about the crisis in the Maldives, wants to change the way we talk about climate change.
Beth Harrison, interim director of the Academy of American Poets, talks about the value of a national poetry month, the well-versed movie, and Poem in Your Pocket Day.
Pultizer Prize-winner Mark Strand on falling in love, leaving the U.S., and the next chapter.
Irina Rozovsky contends with questions of how land, identity, and conflict can be identified into two-dimensional form.
From a new collection of playwright interviews, Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz on Lorca, American directors, and the cross he won’t bear.
Through YouTube and Vimeo, these artists give their fellow Syrians a voice.
From Cairo to Wall Street, are we in the midst of a historic shift in the way governments relate to their citizens?
And then he would knock on the door and my mother would answer and he would say to her, “This is no ordinary child. She understands.”
I wanted to know them, woman and man / the spice of chlorine and adrenaline / to be with them at the edge.
Soon / she’ll let the rodent go / and give you the best thing she knows
Sam Lipsyte on being an American writer in translation and the venerable tradition of masturbation in literature.
Director Micha X. Peled's Bitter Seeds is a compelling portrait of families and biotechnology in modern India.
In North Korea, the hunger games have been raging for quite some time.
Skyrocketing student loan debt has dramatically changed the historical conversation about the social worth of education.
America’s student debt reaches one-trillion dollar mark this month. How did we get here and why?
France has institutionalized discrimination against Muslims, Sikhs, and Jews—but that hasn't stopped India, home to large populations of Muslims and Sikhs, from brokering an international arms deals with the country.
Look how they are reckless in this taming / of gravity, spilling in and out / of duende.
A transracial adoption teaches our writer that issues of race in the U.S. are anything but black and white.
Is a new feminism that glorifies pregnancy and childbirth holding women back?
Demand for drugs was on the rise, and there was more pussy to be had than ever. Can you blame me for helping to move a little bit of both?
The great eater, writer, and humorist Calvin Trillin remembers when journalism wasn't so respectable.
Hoodiephobia is real, irrational, racial—and that’s why the Million Hoodies March is so important.
In Madrid, Lucy McKeon reviews Picasso’s “eternal feminine” exhibit, which is grouped around paintings of women, yet presupposes a male perspective.
Candace Feit on her work exploring loneliness and solitude among fishermen in Tamil Nadu, on India’s south coast.
Q&A with the recent winner of the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
Michael Ondaatje on making fiction of un-remembered autobiography, holding back two-thirds of the story, and bringing the marginalized to the center
The memoirist/poet on adaptation and how all literary trilogies come back to Star Wars.
Is the anti-Occupy law fundamentally un-American?
Cindy Sherman-esque conversations overheard at the Cindy Sherman MOMA exhibit.
Kony 2012 is the starting point—but not the ending point—for this collection of images
Photographer Philip Scott Andrews intimately documents the final flights of the Space Shuttle
Keith Haring—rockstar of the art world, New York City street artist, activist—is no longer a household name. Genevieve Walker reviews the exhibit designed to commemorate his legacy.
American Playwright John Guare on Tennessee Williams, writing strong dialog, and discovering a New Orleans lost in history.
An untold tale from the days of the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan.
Is homeownership, despite three presidents’ best efforts, out of reach for the sinking middle-class? Good riddance, says one former homeowner.
With his sea-goat ready / for departure the mythologist / beholds once again / the shattered world egg
M.I.A. likes to portray herself as a revolutionary, but if the “Bad Girls” video is any indication, she’s more interested in pandering to Western stereotypes of Arab countries.
Updike described Boston’s iconic Fenway Park, celebrating its 100th anniversary this spring, as “a lyric little bandbox.” Pure poetry—and pure fantasy—writes our author.
The Dutch love to chide America on its unethical domestic policy—so it’s time they looked at their own.
The famous documentary photographer on the importance of Nigerians archiving their own history.
The origins of the problems at Fukushima are far older and far more sinister.
A member of the public complained that the settee was getting overheated. And he was right.
Occupy Northville has reached an impasse that only Death can solve — a one-act play.
In a razor sharp buzzing they come to haul me / from my bat-infested nightmare-time—
“Tell me a story,” the bearded man sitting on my living-room sofa commands. The situation, I must admit, is anything but pleasant.
There is beauty to Hawaii, sure. But there is also mundanity.
Genre-defying British writer Geoff Dyer on how watching Tarkovsky’s Stalker on repeat turned into his most successful book.
Why the media loves violent acts by protesters, but not that of the banks.
Novelists Mirza Waheed, Roma Tearne, and Daisy Hasan on how novels help us understand the strife-filled regions of Asia.
Pascal Bruckner’s musings on seduction come just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Whatever song they’re singing / It’s not Tiananmen
When I got home God was already in the living room with his knitting / needles. I asked him if he wanted some of my Cherry Seven-Up
Hoop Dreams director Steve James’s new film follows former gang members who neutralize Chicago gang violence
Captivated by an image of an atom bomb falling on Japan, Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie asks American writers why “Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won’t.”
Tomorrow morning I will take a shower, / nothing else is certain but this.
 | In this excerpt from I Dare to Say, a collection of the real-life stories of African women edited by Hilda Twongyeirwe, Yemo talks about female circumcision. |
The artist Eve Sussman dissects infrastructure as beauty, Soviet-era aesthetics, Occupy Wall Street, Williamsburg lofts, and her latest film that uses an algorithm to distinguish each screening. With a sample selection.
Ahdaf Soueif begins a long-awaited book about her Cairo with the first days of the revolution that changed the world.
Guillermo kissed her and she was not afraid of his tongue and his hands on her body, and she wanted to stay with him all night, wanted to lie down on the wet earth, but he turned around and began walking back, pulling her behind him, and soon they were out on the road and the sound of the insects grew distant, and the trees no longer protected them from the stars.
 | Event at the Free Word Lecture Theatre featured Kamila Shamsie, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and our own Michael Archer. |
In Russian, a language in which there is a separate word for everything, the word “country” means both the territory and the government.
Ethnic identity training in Bosnia and Herzegovina begins in the classroom.
Can a small group of reformers modernize Pakistan’s schools?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on branding, charity, and class in Nigeria's schools.
 | Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. |
 | What Hammond’s Fallen says about American soldier-centered mourning. |
 | Unlike the battering that U.S. solar equipment producers have suffered at the hands of Chinese and other Asian competitors, America is well on its way to building a robust domestic manufacturing platform for wind. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. |
China’s imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner asks what a TV miniseries can teach us about the direction of the new China. From his new book of essays.
South Korean poet on subverting expectations, her use of grotesque language, and the state of feminism in Korea.
As a writer of minor stature but much endurance, I submit now my application regarding my newest project, my life work, The Life Box.
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. |
Begin with the blackbirds you shot for menacing / the finches.
The investigative journalist on the search for Maria Fernanda, the role of Christianity in the trafficking of Guatemalan adoptees, and funding the research for her book via Kickstarter.
As a Fortune 500 company’s fracking activities in rural West Virginia leave a polluted and drastically altered landscape, locals are fighting back.
| Meghan O’Gieblyn’s “Sniffing Glue,” chosen as one of the top 10 essays of the year. |
It’s easy to hate on Maurizio Cattelan’s 21-year retrospective at New York City’s Guggenheim, but its perpetual pantsing and mooning grow on you.
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. |
 | In a video conversation with Harry Kreisler, the journalist Tom Wicker, former columnist for The New York Times, discusses the Presidency and the media at the height of the Cold War. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. |
| In a video conversation with Harry Kreisler, the political scientist Rogers M. Smith discusses the importance of building community and political identity and the increasing polarization around issues of inequality and relative international decline. |
On a mother’s embrace of the teachings of 1970s self-help guru Warner Erhard.
The grandson of a Holocaust survivor visits the town that was home to Auschwitz.
In Croatia it takes a strongman like Alen Borbas—security tycoon and nightclub owner—to open up a nationalist music to outside talent.
There’s a special name for / all of us are having the same dream.
Hugh Hefner was once called a protofeminist and a social radical. But it’s been a while.
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. |
What counted were my widowed cousin / holding her own in a foreign land, / and the grit to say no / to what is hurled—words, glances, bullets, all.
a wounded man drags his one-legged body home from the war through the depths of winter to describe the sighting of the horse to his village.
Our guest editor Porochista Khakpour explores the protean category of “Iranian-American” and its assorted manifestations.
Or, how I got advice from Grandpa Moses on Jewish prayers for the notorious Evin Prison.
| Guernica editor Joel Whitney and other Guernica contributers will participate at this weekend’s PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival. |
| In a video conversation with Harry Kreisler, the historian discusses Lincoln’s relationship to slavery over the course of his career and the comparisons between Lincoln and President Obama and the political situations they have confronted. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. |
| Guernica contributors Amitava Kumar and Oliver de la Paz honored for literary excellence. |
| In a video conversation with Harry Kreisler, the political economist cuts through the hype surrounding India & China’s rise, how socialism laid the groundwork for it and India’s edge. |
This land is your (occupied) land.
Our guest poetry editor Brian Turner selects poems that are imbued with the language of the metropolis.
On the Tucson shootings, reading W.G. Sebald, the limitations of love, and how we manage to keep going.
This month marks the forty-fourth anniversary of Che Guevara’s murder. An analysis of government documents collected in a new book reveals a complex CIA scheme.
All of Paris is quiet, while the oxygen machine / struggles to fill your lungs.
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| Congrats to the Swedish poet and Guernica contributor. |
| Series host Harry Kreisler interviews Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate in Economics. |
 | Join Guernica for a reading and reception to celebrate the publication of Erica Wright’s debut collection. |
A journalist reflects on his encounters with Benazir Bhutto, and on the interconnected nature of food and politics in Pakistan.
With #OccupyWallStreet, the linguist and political critic sees a reason for hope that lies closer to home.
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| A response to the #OccupyWallStreet campaign, now on Day 10. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
The “Social Media” exhibit at New York City’s Pace Gallery explores the way social media provides a peek at the new ways people can emote, communicate, and connect with each other.
| The winner will receive airfare, tuition, and accommodations to the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and publication in Guernica. |
| Series host Harry Kreisler interviews Anatol Lieven, author and Professor of War Studies at King’s College, London. |
A former examiner of Social Security disability applicants had forty minutes to determine a claimant’s fate.
In the beginning, every- / thing was middle, and lovely to behold // (if you like that sort of thing)
Inflaming ethnic divisions, alleged war criminals in Kenya campaign for higher office.
The author of the lauded graphic novel Blankets discusses the influences behind his new book, the effect of 9/11 on his work, and the decline of the superhero in comics.
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
You thought feminists had to focus on empowering women? Stephanie Coontz on why, after a sustained assault on families and unions, that just isn't enough anymore.
| Series host Harry Kreisler interviews John Campbell, former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria. |
At a dinner party hosted by an Afghan warlord, Jon Lee Anderson meets one of the last remaining maskharas—an entertainer, professional blackmailer, master thief, and prolific murderer.
While book sales are making a comeback the question remains, will e-books continue to make thousand-percent leaps in growth, eventually swallowing the book publishing industry whole?
India is indeed rising. So why are more than three-quarters of the country living on less than fifty cents a day? A snapshot of inequity, in four scenes.
Now I remember The broken rib / Your tight hold on that wisdom tooth / The sound your kneecap made on rock
Nelda didn’t know of anyone else turning thirty who’d never kissed a man. Her sister Maria said women who never made out with anyone were prone to a nervous condition in their old age.
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| Congrats to Guernica contributors Patricia Engel, Assaf Gavron, Stephan Salisbury and Zoya Phan and interviewees Howard Zinn and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for their nominations. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| Series host Harry Kreisler interviews UC Berkeley’s Hubert Dreyfus and Harvard’s Sean Dorrance Kelly, Professors of Philosphy. |
| From its opening line, “My first year in the United States Navy, I let another boy give me a blow job,” we knew we in for a wild ride. |
 | What a long, strange trip it’s been. |
Is it possible to express emotion through numbers?
| The film completely trivializes the suffering and hard work that went into making civil rights a reality. |
 | In a new interview, linguist and activist Noam Chomsky discusses the drug cartels of Mexico, the government’s error-prone response to the “War on Drugs,” and what the U.S. education system could learn from Mexico. |
In Afghanistan, the U.S. military disposes of garbage—computers, motorbikes, TVs, shoes, even human feces—in open burn pits. Are toxic clouds from these sites making everyone sick?
An American living in Cuba discovers Havana’s black-market epicurean scene.
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
 | A look at a potentially shocking Pentagon program to influence jihadis online that someone in Congress should investigate fast. |
 | Why the death of tribal languages matters. |
| Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. |
 | Nobody knows what kind of regime may rise after the Asads. One thing is certain, however: if the next system is to any extent democratic or representative, it will struggle for the rights of the Palestinian people. |
 | Iranian American writer, Salar Abdoh, corresponds with his friend Majed, a documentary filmmaker, in Afghanistan. Majed reports here on his travels in the Middle East. |
| Congrats to Guernica contributors Adam Day, Elliott Holt, and Ishion Hutchinson and Guernica interviewee Stacy Schiff. We’re not surprised you all won. |
 | Part two of the author’s report on Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto. What is “cultural Marxism”? |
 | If our lawmakers continue to obsess about the wrong thing and fail to do what must be done, Americans will only become more fearful, insecure, and angry. |
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Converting schools and universities into facilities that produce commodities for the job market, privatizing them, slashing their budgets—do we really want this future? |
| Part one of the author’s report on how Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto is a valuable guide to understanding contemporary far right ideology and its potential impact. |
| Series host Harry Kreisler interviews UC Berkeley’s Ken Goldberg, Craigslist Distinguished Professor of New Media. |
 | Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s notated Bible is for sale on Ebay, because we all deserve to get a voyeuristic glimpse into someone else’s serious religious crisis. |
 | For Rebecca Solnit and Virginia Woolf, thought travels by detour and collision. |
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La Figa: Visions of Food and Form is about “eating well and making love and creating art.” Also, it’s bad. |
 | Human Rights Watch questions whether the Bush administration will get away with torture. Unfortunately, the answer points to yes. |
| A tour de force exploration of the war crisis that lurks behind the debt-ceiling crisis. |
| Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned in 2008 for “inciting subversion” against the motherland. His wife has been under house arrest since 2010. Now the UN has declared their arrests illegal. |
How it will all end is anybody’s guess, but the future remains wide open. Not only in the Middle East: everywhere, there are victories and emerging possibilities. You just have to open your eyes.
Checking the pulse of Colorado’s blend of faith, politics, and violence, Sharlet comes face to face with a college friend’s colorful political supporters.
“It is bad that a man who has swum in the great River Niger should be drowned in its small tributary.”
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| The construction of a dam in Ethiopia threatens tribes’ standard of living and promises to be profitable only for those already in a position of power. |
| It’s July. New York is hot, smelly, and loud. Pedro Reyes’s Sanatorium offered some participants a chance for calm, self-reflection. |
| A decade of war culminating in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression hasn’t done much good for the country, but it has been strangely good for the Red Sox—and a no-less well funded Pentagon. |
| Cat got your tongue? Why Obama isn’t telling America the truth. |
| If journalism can’t be trusted, democracy is on a slippery slope. |
| Who is Standard & Poor’s to tell America how much debt it has to shed in order to keep its credit rating? |
| Tim DeChristopher isn’t asking for mercy; he’s asking you to join him. |
| Iranian American writer, Salar Abdoh, corresponds with his friend Majed, a documentary filmmaker, in Afghanistan. Majed reports here on his travels in the Middle East. |
| Twelve points where Murdoch has impacted our world and our lives, even if they are obscured in the daily rush of revelations. |
| Deserts may be patient, they may have all the time in the world, but we don’t. We have to act now. |
| Why does being caught in contradictions often makes us hold on to them even tighter? |
| The virtual impunity of the rich and powerful is a widely known fact. Why continue to rub our noses in it? |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| Be proud, America! In the name of security, the U.S. is spreading fear & hate. |
| Joel Sternfeld’s photographs show us a time when the High Line was a river of grass. |
| 40 years ago the 26th Amendment lowered the U.S. voting age from 21 to 18. Now, Professor John Seery, explains to critics why “old enough to fight, old enough to vote,” should also be old enough to run for Congress. |
| The real reason Wall Street has spent the last year bludgeoning Dodd-Frank into meaninglessness. |
| An open letter to New York Press film critic Armond White in response to his review of the latest installment of the Harry Potter film series. |
| A brilliant anatomy of a planet in trouble told in terms of a single loaf of Egyptian bread. |
| In the best way, reading Ben Mirov’s Vortexts is like perpetually trying to recover one’s train of thought mid-sentence but always failing. |
| Per usual, Morris plays up the humor in an already absurd story…only the end result here is a little disappointing. |
| The writer explores how effective railing against Islam has actually been in past election campaigns and the role it might play in 2012. |
| If Obama wants a second term, he’ll have to come out swinging on jobs. |
| What to read after Kyle Minor’s novel excerpt that conflates sex, religion, and the impulse to colonize and dominate. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
The best way to understand the world is not as a metaphorical prison but a literal one.
Once I was home, Dad told me: You have the blood / of 100,000 innocent Iraqis on your hands.
There were big ones and small ones and medium-sized ones, blonde and brunette, and even bald ones…
| Screenwriter and professor James Schamus was invited to the West Bank to teach a class for Israelis and Palestinians on the role of film and art in times of crisis. Here is his report. |
| How Leon Panetta’s recent trip to Afghanistan and Iran reveal nothing more than what a microphone in Washington would have. |
| How George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror fantasies and delusions were embedded in our world and have now become the humdrum norm of Obama policy. |
| We all like pageantry (Kate and William and all), but the South Sudan independence story shouldn’t bury the strategic angle. |
| The events in Measure for Measure prove we have not come far enough when a man’s word still counts for more than a woman’s and when an elected official can play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. |
| What to read after Eric Benson’s pilgrimage in search of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges |
| War has been, and we still expect it to be, the most massive collective project human beings undertake. But it has been evolving quickly in a very different direction, one in which human beings have a much smaller role to play. |
| When we count on celebrities to provide us with guidance on politics and news, we can easily be led astray. Here, we review a battle between Ashton Kutcher and a newspaper, and find Kutcher coming up short. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| Tomorrow Republic of South Sudan celebrates its independence. Guernica counts down its top five reports on Sudan. |
| Is Secretary of Defense Robert Gates more deserving of the Presidential Medal of Honor than the young private who gave Americans a far fuller sense of what our government is actually doing abroad? |
| Arrests and beatings have escalated over the last week in Syria. People have been shot dead in the Damascus suburbs. And now the slaughter in Hama. |
| You provide the marriage license. They provide the wedding. |
 | The job crisis we know nothing about should be the shame of the nation. |
| Something good coming out of the World Wildelife Fund’s infamous chumminess with big corporations? Who knew? |
| Every U.S. intervention is sold as serving beneficent ends. However, there’s always another purpose—and the public is the last to learn the truth. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| What President Obama’s words really tell us about the state of the nation. |
suddenly, strangely peopled, like Robin / in sheaves of rain, the land blurs April / into a fiction that never ends
But none could slap my face as hard as the sea slaps / its adopted child and then steps back, all tears.
What delighted me was watching how the sun changed my appearance. I spent nightly hours in the mirror, describing the new shades and hues of my face or arms to my martin, who was colorblind.
James Harold Jennings was a visionary artist and well-known eccentric in his hometown of Pinnacle, North Carolina. And, perhaps, the American brand of fear, fatalism, and nihilism.
On the fiftieth anniversary of Borges’s first visit to Texas, Eric Benson searches for traces of the fabulist in the Lone Star State.
Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Angola were the three rings of the Reagan Doctrine, the war by proxy, and none turned out well. And the former president’s support of despots and violent insurgencies guaranteed a future of errant, and deadly, U.S. foreign policy.
| The why of the massive bombing of Libya continues to grow more nonsensical. Congress is baffled into paralysis, and our major media stick to the most honorable interpretation—despite evidence to the contrary. |
| At periodic intervals, the American body politic has shown a marked susceptibility to messianic fevers. Whenever an especially acute attack occurs, a sort of delirium ensues, manifesting itself in delusions of grandeur and demented behavior. |
| For giant oil companies like BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell, an eventual shift away from petroleum will have massive economic consequences. |
| If only everything was like “Waka Waka,” but unfortunately not everything is as euphonious as a pop song. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| The essential point of this march is that people must be the subject and not the object in our own lives. |
| Nine common terms associated with our present wars that probably don’t mean what you think they mean. |
| Like the fines leveled against fornicators under the English feudal system, the GOP attack on Planned Parenthood is a way to keep poor women down. |
| Imagine if the public service of Eisenhower, JFK, and FDR were cut short by the media coverage of their indiscretions. Would we be better off if these men never became president? Of course not. |
| The subject of the new documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times makes you wonder how America has allowed itself to be sated on a diet of high-fructose Kardashian for so many seasons. |
| The Pulitzer Prize-winning author on her impending trip to Gaza, “SlutWalk,” and The Chicken Chronicles. |
A photographer and former Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana observes the beauty of the dark and the politics of electricity. (With video.)
this could be a comfort amid machines / a cure for feeling remanded
They sit down in an orderly, patient manner, packed together in the belly of the beast. The smell of varnish lingers on inside and intoxicates them all.
Ariel Levy on the rush to lose her virginity at fourteen, recalling: “Nobody would gasp if they heard a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old had lost her virginity. The clock was ticking.”
Where there are no words, knowledge comes through physical acts and through the space through which those acts are made.
The Story of O shocked readers worldwide with its sadomasochistic love affair written in a style “too direct, too cool, to be that of a woman.” Carmela Ciuraru examines the life of O’s author.
| What Simon thinks of the Department of Justice’s prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanizing drug prohibition. |
 | How different was it to be raped by a suitor in 1747 than today? |
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The Wall Street Journal and Commentary’s condescending remarks about the first female editor of the New York Times reveal an underlying sexism. |
 | A Guernica fiction writer on how the search became more important than the homeland. |
| Conservationist Mindy Baha El Din about the rise of the environmental movement in post-revolution Egypt, tourism and the challenges ahead. |
| How George W. Bush may have been making a political calculation when he declared himself “Born Again.” |
 | What to read after Alia Yunis’s story of a girl dealing with her sister’s unexpected death. |
| Even if the troops do finally leave, the question is: Will that actually bring the U.S. occupation of Iraq to a close? |
| Washington doesn’t want to admit the economy recovery has stalled, so it’s time for the unemployed to speak up. |
| While some criticize Meir Dagan for recent comments on Israel, what we should really be asking is why this doesn’t happen more often. |
| Will the stalling economy finally wake Washington up from the games being played over the debt ceiling? |
| What we discover when we sift through digital refuse. |
| If we don’t abandon a belief that unrestricted growth is our inalienable birthright the future is likely to prove grim indeed. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
 | What to read after Abu-Jaber’s tale of a conflicted fat kid. |
| We now inhabit an all-new, far less hospitable, far more rugged planet of our own making. |
| This week’s big news—that cell phones cause cancer—isn’t new to anyone who’s been paying attention for the past 16 months. |
 | Today’s graduates face miserable job prospects, and experts say the student loan crisis could be worse than the credit card or housing bubbles. |
| Robert Reich traces the history of the economy, from Depression to prosperity and now to stagnation. |
I was in the bathroom stall at the Armenian chicken place in Anaheim when I overheard Sarah say to her even more annoying friend Abeer at the mirror, where they were both putting on gobs of makeup, “I’m just going to kill myself, habibti, if I don’t make the triple axel at the championships next month.”
Will witch hunts for deserters and its initial refusal to arrest Mubarak lead Egypt’s military down a blind alley of violence and tyranny?
The straw-boned seabirds are blown / from their trawlers, their religion of fish.
| When it comes to acts of state today, there is only one law: don’t pull up the curtain. |
| We need to pay homage to those who teach kids in the most difficult place of all: jail. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| Are studies like this, by serious researchers, always ignored, or do people ever pay attention and actually change their minds? |
| A striking assessment of why Pakistan isn’t slated to lose any future showdown with the Obama administration. |
 | This response to a response to a response to a response takes George Scialabba and Noam Chomsky to task for seemingly hasty analogies and false accusations. |
| The media accuses candidates like Trump and Palin of making the elections into a “circus,” but the real problems are the candidates who seem more legitimate. |
 | A genuine class war is being fought openly in our time, and last week, a so-called socialist put himself on the wrong side of it. |
 | When, exactly, did we agree to allow others—data-mining firms, pharmaceutical companies, and who knows who else—to access personal data and profit by its dissemination? |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| If nobody told you otherwise, you could easily believe that almost every breaking Afghan story in the last four weeks came from some previous year of the war. |
 | Both poetry and horse racing still give us a ticket to ride, a little bit of chance in our pockets. A little rally, rally, rally. |
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What is it like on both sides of the translator-poet equation? |
| The Pentagon is leaning ever more heavily on rich rulers in the Arab world to prop up the military-corporate complex at home. |
| Japan has committed to building an entirely new, less nuclear-reliant energy policy. Maybe we should consider doing the same. |
Elected in 2009, leftist Mauricio Funes became the first Salvadoran president to apologize for government death squads. Dara Kerr investigates the massacre and subsequent cover-up, the U.S. role in the killings, and the backdrop for an unprecedented apology.
| War pornographers can’t offer us an objective look at a world in which more and more foreigners only run into Americans when they are wearing green and carrying weapons. |
After relocating her family to Brazil, a young mother learns the limits of the landscape.
Hello, darkling, / where’ve you been all my life?
He grew tame // and hunted the dreams of farm kids—every tree scratch / on the window were his nails, every pregnant farm girl // was knocked up with the devil's seed and spiderbabies.
The Taliban is alive and active. James Fergusson recounts his face-to-face meeting, in a mine-protected Afghan village, with one of the feared group’s most powerful figures.
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| Our wars and their impact are kept in remarkable isolation from what passes for public affairs in this country, leaving most Americans with little say about whether they should be, and how they are, waged. |
 | The tempo of base life is strange. It swings from extreme boredom to high stress, day after day after day. |
| The bottom line: visibility is crucial—if action is to follow. This is why we cannot depend on “old media” any more than on “old energy.” |
 | George Scialabba on how “panting polemicist” Christopher Hitchens’s remarks against Noam Chomsky are evidence of a widespread and troubling failure among intellectuals. |
 | Every thirty minutes a farmer in India commits suicide, according to a new report. Last June, Guernica looked at why. |
| Robert Reich on Mitt Romney, the political chameleon that says nothing in a crowd-pleasing way. |
 | How a labor dispute in the National Football League tells us everything we need to know about America. |
| What we almost never see discussed is the bottom line. What is the long-term nature of the Islamic fundamentalist threat, or the nature of the worldview and grievances behind it? |
| Will this warped recovery of ours pave the way for an even more warped economy, with the have-nots at one end, the have-it-alls at the other end, and increasingly less of us in between? |
| As the economy slows and we head toward recession, Washington needs to increase public spending, not fight over how to cut. |
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.
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From the stark lines that close its opening paragraph: “I used the pink foam. My period was late,” senior editor Katherine Dykstra knew “Lucky Girl” was perfect for Guernica. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| When the celebrations and partying over his death fade…we’ll once again be left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us, and it will be easy to see just how paltry a thing this “victory,” his killing, is almost 10 years later. |
| Do we, after all of the years of lying, all of a sudden accept whatever the government says as true? |
| Washington is talking about balancing the budget on the backs of the elderly, but the economic security they enjoyed at one time is already imperiled. |
 | In the debut episode of Journey OnEarth, a series about communities affected by pollution, we look at the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster through the eyes of the people trying to understand the impact of the spill. |
| It turns out that Monsanto's Roundup herbicide might not be nearly as safe as people have thought, but the media is staying mum on the revelation. |
| What if, from the beginning, everyone killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars had been buried in a single large cemetery easily accessible to the American public? Would it bring the fighting to a halt more quickly? |
 | The best outcome of bin Laden’s death would be for us to declare victory in the “war on terror” and bring the troops home. |
| Is it really so illogical to imagine China as the next “sole superpower” on planet Earth? |
| In an era of racism without racists, the Tea Party GOP Birther brigands provide one more lesson in the permanence of the social evil known as White privilege. |
Despite everything, Slavoj Žižek still believes the Idea of communism is the most appropriate for our end times of crises and monsters.
| Corporate profits for the first quarter of the year are way up. That’s largely because corporate payrolls are down. |
| Shahin and Juan Cole take up the role of women in the Arab Spring uprisings, not in a single place but across the region. |
 | The author of “Dear Yale” talks about why cultivating a college’s image as a brand is sad, pathological, and anti-democratic. |
| If Americans knew what we were really getting with each side of the budget debate, they wouldn't be so quick to advocate moving to the center. |
| For more than 50 years, Washington has been served well by a system of global power based on subordinate elites. Now those loyal allies look like an empire of failed states. |
| “As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.” |
| Empires live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. |
| “Take Lisa Simpson and combine her with Gordon Gekko and the obnoxious child-android from ‘Small Wonder,’ and you get the perfect Rand hero.” |
| Guernica feature writer Alexis Madrigal provides further reading recommendations for reminding us that nature always has the last word. |
| A reader of Irish-language literature responds to Amit Chaudhuri’s claim that Gaelic and Welsh failed to become “viable literatures.” |
| What if every solemn reference to Israel’s “security needs” were greeted not with nodding heads, but with the eye-rolling skepticism it deserves? |
 | As part of the University of Iowa project on travel writing, Alice Pung recalls (not) visiting a death prison in Cambodia. |
 | Guernica and OR Books present a conversation between political scientist Norman Finkelstein and Palestinian writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh at Alwan for the Arts, 8 p.m., April 19th. |
| The author of “Molecularity” warns us that “a hungry accident is about to happen” and suggests a few things to read in the meantime. |
The dog wakes, rushes toward the wood. / Then it realizes which world it’s in / & lies down again.
The world's first nuclear reactors were fast-tracked while hailed as an economic breakthrough. By the time the public knew the truth, the atomic myth was up and running. As the recent disaster in Japan reminds us, nature always has the last word.
A from-the-ground report on how the tapping of Angola’s natural resources has kept the country a killing field, and made it one of the world’s most glaringly inefficient kleptocracies.
The new translation of Tagore's childhood memoir tells us much about the man who would later reshape Bengali literature and music (and chastise Mahatma Gandhi), says Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen.
On the 150th anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore's birth, Amit Chaudhuri discusses the Nobel Laureate's life and poetry, his embrace of chance in the creation process, and his meetings with Albert Einstein.
| If you are one of the lucky ones who has been blessed, fairly or not, with the benefits this country, its people, and its economy can bestow, you might well ask: What have I done in return? |
| A Q&A with a former sex worker, who weaves her own painful story of being lured into “the life,” with the stories of the girls and women that she now helps. |
 | The problem with Bill Donohue’s full-page ad in the New York Times is that it attacks groups of people under the name of faith in the face of equity. |
| “If my book is a problem, I asked, ‘why did you give me a visa?’ He looked at me. ‘We are also asking that question.’” |
 | The question demands to be asked: Are we winning yet? And if not, why persist in an effort for which great pain is repaid with such little gain? |
 | Josef Hoflehner’s ‘Jet Airliner’ photographs beg the question, just how healthy is our relationship to flight? |
| Fox News and Glenn Beck want the world to believe that all the people who spoke out against him had no impact on this decision. Don't buy it. |
| Poetry is, at once, fueling its own come back, and dying in the back alley of all things that don’t matter? So which one is it? Dying or living? Or, is it like us humans, doing both at the same time. |
| Why progressives need to think beyond the mantra of creating a “middle class America.” |
| As his life slowly ebbed, Chal would sometimes exclaim in great agitation, “I don’t know what to do.” I always replied, “You don’t have to do anything, you’ve done enough.” |
| Since the technology to reveal government secrets won’t go away, no matter what is done to WikiLeaks, the government wants to make you afraid you’ll end up like Bradley Manning if you blow the whistle. So said Greenwald at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston on Friday. |
| While the media goes crazy over the union between Kate and William, here are some more tangible reasons the royal wedding should make you insane. |
| Canada is the leading oil-supplier of the United States. Let me repeat that: the U.S. imports more oil from Canada than (yes) Mexico, which ranks second, and (believe it or not) Saudi Arabia, which ranks only third. |
| As Ai Weiwei’s whereabouts are still unknown, netizens have taken it upon themselves to spread his message. |
| We are the richest nation in the world, richer than we’ve ever been. We can afford to remain a society whose members are in it together. |
| Today’s working and middle-class taxpayers are shelling out a bigger chunk of income in payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes than thirty years ago. It’s just the opposite for super rich. |
| “The global media and many visiting photographers see Detroit as an abandoned and dead city…What is constantly absent from these soulless images are the people.” |
| Warren and the AGs are demanding that the banks pay for the damage they have done AND create jobs. How refreshing! |
| “It’s not that we don’t want you to have these things,” conservatives say, “It’s just that they’ll ruin the economy and bring about widespread catastrophe.“ |
| Don’t expect to take your tap water for granted ever again. |
| For how else could the American leaves of grass join their top-dressed companions on a golf course unless they borrowed money? |
| “As a result of the disaster at Fukushima,” wrote Monbiot, “I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.” Here’s why he’s made a big blunder. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
 | It is better that the intervention in Libya not be branded a U.S. one, but rather be seen as the effort of the 28 nations of NATO plus the Arab League. It is true that the U.S. is a big part of NATO, but it doesn’t have to be a big part of the air war. |
| If Arabs elsewhere could insist on their dignity, why should Syrians continue to put up with the regime’s casual barbarity? |
 | “We all know that the western intervention in Libya is problematic, but it also remains the right decision.” |
| According to Mercy Corps, some 66 percent of the Kashmir valley’s population is under 30 years old. Those youth who have come of age during turmoil are finding new ways to speak out. |
| Who knows if Wisconsin wasn’t the beginning of the end, but the beginning of something new? |
| Did Mike Huckabee just flush his presidential aspirations down the proverbial toilet? |
She taught Deadbeat // perineum, wanted a word in exchange. He offered her / duende, which she had.
I'm younger than anyone here, and I have read // Books about bees, but I've only been stung twice.
David Simon would be happy to find out that The Wire was hyperbolic and ridiculous, and that the “American Century” is still to come. But he's not betting on it.
From his memoir, our author finds himself caught between man and woman where tough (and humorous) decisions abound.
On the verge of arrest, a Palestinian lawyer and author recounts the flight from arrest of an ancestor active during the Ottoman years [an excerpt from A Rift in Time (2011), published by OR Books].
 | Hundreds of thousands of protesters, workers, and union supporters march through downtown Los Angeles in opposition of the nation-wide attack on union rights and the American worker. |
| Watch out. The economy is slowing ominously, and the booster rockets are disappearing. |
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This week, Dowie and his guest address the rising popularity of bottled water and how this practice has changed our environment. |
 | The Wisconsin Republican Party wants copies of Professor William Cronon's emails. His crime? He wrote them an open letter that wasn’t wholly congratulatory. |
| Nathan Wissell wants Cincinnati to understand its own transit system. A good map can do the trick. |
| Though the Chamber claims to represent all of American business, their constituency is really that handful of huge dinosaur companies that would rather lobby than adapt. |
| Just in case you thought that “political correctness” had been thoroughly discredited in the culture wars of the 1990s, it’s back—and this time it’s being treated as a stalking horse for terrorism. |
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Frightening at times, uplifting at others, the liminal, dreamlike spaces of Bruno Schulz’s fiction are rare amongst even our most imaginative artists. |
| [Geraldine Ferraro] was not just the first Catholic woman to run for Vice President on a major party ticket. She was the woman who ended the control Catholic bishops had on the Democratic Party. It’s up to us to ensure that her story is told in all its fullness for generations to come. |
| This is not a moment of hope but the start of a period of great division between Syrians, a period of blood and fear in which Syria’s vital regional role will be problematized. |
| While it is nearly impossible to justify killing, all evidence suggests that more people will die if the United States doesn’t intervene. So as long as this campaign—this war—is fought to help the Libyan people, and not to advance U.S. interests, it is a just one. |
| After publicly demanding paid sick days, organized workers at the fast-food sandwich chain were fired. |
| Algeria’s predicament is a massive displacement of the population toward an absolute and irreversible Elsewhere. |
| In the wake of its present disaster, Japan may already be changing, and that may not be a bad thing. |
| Runners run, jumpers jump, boxers stay on their feet if they can. But Guernica’s interview with Sahrawi runner Salah Ameidan is a reminder that athletes can be a problem for regimes that don’t like the values they symbolize merely by being who they are. |
| Is there any hope of help arriving for the “99ers”? |
| Recently in Karachi, the previously unheard of Movement for the Protection of the Invitation to Islam posted banners encouraging the murder of author Tehmina Durrani. |
| You might think that a danger virulent enough to outlast human languages would be a danger to avoid, but the hubris of the nuclear establishment is equal to its willingness to deceive. |
| Author Sherry Turkle on her new book arguing that relentless connection through technology leads to a new solitude. |
| Pro-business goals are breaking out all over. House and Senate Republicans are intent on deregulating, privatizing, and cutting spending and taxes…But most Americans are still in desperate trouble. |
| The 79 year-old Guernica interviewee who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times was arrested at a rally for Bradley Manning. |
| [N]othing is more central to average Americans than jobs and wages. Unless the President forcefully rebuts Republican’s big lies, they’ll soon become conventional wisdom. |
| Every time a Tomahawk cruise missile blows up a building in Libya (and everyone inside it), war-profiteer Raytheon makes $1.5 million. |
| “And so, for decades, that part of my childhood remained the dark but largely forgotten underside of the golden 1950s. I never thought I'd want it back, but with six nuclear plants threatening to melt down in Fukushima, Japan, I find that I do.” |
 | In London’s Imperial War Museum, two artifacts from Baghdad, 90 years apart in age, have become symbols of historic, imperial competition and the continued hubris of war, dressed up by “democracy.” |
| The greater Detroit area is the nexus of an entire host of progressive enterprises, notable for both the diversity of its participants and the diversity of its projects. |
| Could it be that America is actually turning less violent? Or are we as violent as ever—but have simply found less interpersonal means of assuaging our urges? |
| When a revolution is made, people suddenly find themselves in a changed state—of mind and of nation. The ordinary rules are suspended, and people become engaged with each other in new ways, and develop a new sense of power and possibility. |
| Events taking place in the Fukushima No. 1 power plant are simply unprecedented and the situation appears to be deteriorating. |
| If Libyans end up handing over economic control to the West, it will be the fault of the Libyans, not of the no-fly zone resolution. |
| At times heartbreaking, the memoir is also a comforting tale about the importance of family, making sense of shifting gender roles, and believing in others. |
| A correspondent in Tripoli renounces her anonymity after fleeing to Morocco. |
| Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. |
| Through Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus has made entrepreneurs of beggars and community leaders of the disregarded. The very least the Bangladeshi government can do in return is let him step down when he chooses. |
| A mother in Japan, whose daughter is confined to a wheelchair, reflects on the difficulties of getting through natural disasters with a disability. |
| The collision between natural hazards and human society and economy is what creates a disaster. |
| The U.S. economy is flirting with another dip, but nothing is being done because knaves and fools are in charge. |
 | Declaring that it was neither anti-union nor anti-worker, the Times editorial page recently set out to assess whether New York’s state workers have been overpaid—and, lo and behold, they are. |
| The March issue of the Oxford American is dedicated to the fierce Mississippi-bred writer and professor Barry Hannah, who died a little over a year ago on March 1, 2010. In a video shot by writer and friend John Oliver Hodges on his time spent as Hannah’s right-hand man, the two revisit some of Hannah’s old ghosts. |
| “Following the surprise visit of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Bahrain, home of the American Fifth Fleet, tanks and troops of the Saud family dictatorship have crossed the causeway and are now occupying Manama.” |
| The editors of the OED just have to add “dude lit” to their database and, in doing so, ensure an equal opportunity for insult. |
| How outrageous that PJ Crowley was punished for simply telling the truth about Bradley Manning's imprisonment while the war criminals go free. |
| “These murders [in Itamar] were immoral and politically counter-productive. They gave Israel an excuse to whine about the bloodthirstiness of the natives and a pretext for building hundreds more homes in the West Bank.” |
| [M]any in the Obama White House have concluded that the president should follow Clinton’s campaign script… If it worked for Clinton, it must work for Obama—or so it’s supposed. |
During 2005, while our author lived in East Jerusalem and worked in Ramallah and the Gaza Strip, he moved through at least four checkpoints every day. This is what that was like.
 | “Whatever his short-term victory, Walker has overreached, igniting a nation-wide, populist, progressive labor movement that is long overdue, and that will have an epochal reach far beyond Wisconsin.” |
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This week Dowie and his guest talk social networking, gender identities, and breast health. |
| With the nuclear meltdowns in japan, it’s up to us to peacefully and insistently shut our U.S. plants down. |
| “The Libyan revolution risks drowning in blood. If it does, the larger Arab revolution may well grind to a temporary halt.” |
Would you run in the Olympics for the country that occupied your birth country and refused to allow its independence? The subject of a forthcoming documentary on his contested homeland, the Western Sahara.
| The winner’s work will be published in an upcoming issue of Guernica. |
| Thousands of protesters, unionists, and supporters of the American worker descend on Ohio’s capitol city in opposition of Governor Kasich’s SB5 anti-collective bargaining bill. |
| A new report from the UN advises ditching corporate-controlled and chemically intensive farming in favor of agroecology. |
| “Three mummies were recently found in an underground temple in Luxor, Egypt. Translated hieroglyphs identified them as the Clash of Civilizations, the End of History, and Islamophobia. They ruled in Western domains into the second decade of the twenty-first century before dying and being embalmed.” |
| The latest jobs report indicates that the unemployment and job creation rates are better than a year ago, but there are problems with the numbers. |
| “Climate change challenges everything conservatives believe in. So they’re choosing to disbelieve it, at our peril.” |
| Wisconsin Republicans have made it crystal clear that their goal has had nothing whatever to do with the state budget. It’s been to bust the unions. |
| A person suffers embarrassment when something true about himself emerges in spite of reasonable efforts to conceal it. It is the same with nations. |
| We Americans do love our bad showbiz boys running amok. |
| Dior fired its celebrated head designer for making anti-Semitic statements. But don’t expect a renaissance in the racially tense world of high fashion. |
| Happy Birthday Wall Street. Party away. Just know that most Americans aren’t joining the celebration. |
| The tighter Walker holds on to his union-busting bill, the weaker his grip on the office of governor. |
| “Few civilized countries in the world who have such a war fetish as Americans have.” |
 | Israel, a county of immigrants gripped by Islamophobia and a rising tide of racism, offers the U.S. a reflection of itself … a frightening glimpse of where America could be headed. |
 | Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, who is featured in Guernica's next issue, will be lecturing tonight. |
| It’s time, once and for all, to lock the gates. It’s time to use the U.S. military only in the genuine defense of this country. |
| The People’s Party may not yet be recognized by the mainstream media, but it’s growing in numbers and in intensity. And it’s starting to push elected officials—first at the state level—to listen and respond. |
| The new conservative mediamakers are shedding the baggage of culture war hangups, freeing up energy to infiltrate culture industries and attack the left. |
| How a revolution is changing the way Americans look at Islam. |
| Who says you need celebrities to get ratings? Rachel Maddow had a nice surprise last Wednesday when her show got a major ratings boost — as she covered the protests and injustices in Wisconsin and Ohio. |
| Conservative economists have it wrong. The underlying problem isn’t that so many Americans have priced themselves out of the global/high-tech labor market. It’s that they’re getting a smaller and smaller share of the pie. |
| For too long, environmentalists have been viewed as self-righteous killjoys demanding that everyone overhaul their wasteful habits. It is time to change that. |
| Ian’s Pizza in Madison, WI has become a beacon of solidarity for people around the world. More than 500 pizzas have been called in, feeding protesters at the capitol building morning, noon, and night. |
| While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics. |
 | Poet Timothy Donnelly on the inspirations for his new book The Cloud Corporation. |
| If gay actors can’t play straight convincingly, and are losing gay roles to straight actors, what parts are left? |
| While a handful of major oil-producing areas launched the Petroleum Age … it’s been the Middle East that has quenched the world’s thirst for oil since World War II. |
| The President must make a clear statement of who is responsible for the crisis — the corporate class and the right and those politicians who enable them. |
| But bit by bit, Facebook privacy has been vanishing—even as more people put more their lives and information on the site. |
| “[Omanis] are proud of their country’s safety and security and they do not want to ruin that…What they do not know is that what they are doing is a kind of hypocrisy. It is as if you know that your child is sick but you do not want to admit it because you are afraid of what others would say.” |
| The backlash against the Koch influence in Wisconsin is gaining steam, with labor supporters starting to boycott Koch Industries' many products (listed here). |
| Teachers are being fired, Pell grants for the poor are being slashed, energy assistance for the needy is disappearing, other vital public services shriveling. Regulatory agencies don’t have the budgets to pay the people they need to enforce the law. Where are the Democrats? |
| “[Qaddafi] and his gangsters are trembling. He has nothing to do but to expose his very true personal Libyan Mafia to the world. The more cities he loses control over, the more he threatens and the more blood he adds to his hands.” |
| Susie Linfield will discuss Sontag's relationship to the female intellectual at City University of New York this Friday, March 4. |
| American taxpayers should know just what they are paying for. So let’s go through what we know about the U.S. national security budget, step by step, and add it all up. Buckle your seat belts. |
Will recent advances in human tissue preservation change the way we think about bodies, death, God… and China?
| Nothing says “sanctity of life” better than cervical cancer, breast cancer, and HIV! |
| Did Bush and Baker mean to maintain the friendlier policy toward Iraq and just mismanage, bungling us into war, as Murray Waas argued at the time? Or did they engage in the most Machiavellian of manipulations, using a seasoned and apparently sincere diplomat to say one thing as they were planning another? |
| If we have learned anything from the revolts that have spread all over the Arab world, it is that using violence against the protesters makes them more united and determined to get what they came for. |
| “For this brief moment at least, people here in Madison are bound together by a single cause, as other protesters were not so long ago, and may be again, in the ancient cities of Egypt.” |
| A University of Wisconsin professor reports, with photos, on the extraordinary sense of solidarity at the protests against Governor Scott Walker. |
| Libya, unlike Egypt and Tunisia or the other states where revolutionary upheavals are underway, is moving toward a military confrontation closer to a civil war. |
 | Do I have to be a woman to believe in women’s rights? Do I have to be gay to believe in gay rights? . |
| “The world needs to know that what’s happening in Libya is no longer a response to protest; it’s genocide. Qaddafi’s forces shoot civilians from ambulances using anti-aircraft guns! People are struggling against heavy weapons with stones. And now Qaddafi has once again showed up with more bloodcurdling threats to turn Libya into ‘embers of fire.’” |
 | Variety’s group editor weighs in on this year’s Academy Award nominations and why some films get left out. |
| If America had higher marginal tax rates we wouldn’t be firing teachers or slashing Medicaid or hurting the most vulnerable members of our society. |
| High school students who try to start atheist groups are being buffered at every turn by the administration, so it's time for them to be more aggressive. |
Two filmmakers survey the damage from the financial collapse to the present.
| You might think that, as vast swathes of the Greater Middle East are set ablaze, someone in Washington would take a new look at our Af/Pak War and wonder whether it isn’t simply beside the point. No such luck. |
| According to Rolling Stone, the U.S. military is getting desperate—that is, desperate enough to try and dupe unwitting senators into giving them more money. |
| We should be very wary about the DEA allowing regulation and marketing of pharmaceutical products containing plant-derived THC. |
| Our anonymous source in Tripoli reports on the latest violence, and asks, “At what point does it become reasonable for international intervention in Libya to stop the butchering of protesters?” |
| The author of this post asks: why these attacks on an organization whose mission, contained in its very name, is to reduce unplanned pregnancies? How did Planned Parenthood come to be so demonized? |
| Wisconsin governor and union-buster extraordinaire Scott Walker has been fooled by a progressive blog editor posing as David Koch. The prank caller, Buffalo Beast editor Ian Murphy, got some amazingly off-guard comments out of Walker. Catch the video and part of the transcript here. |
| Unlike the uprising in Egypt, the revolutionaries in Libya have not been protected by TV cameras. In fact, they have faced the most extreme, Israeli-style violence since the first day. |
| What the Supreme Court will decide here is whether corporate interests trump the interests of doctors, patients, and the general public. |
| The United States’ isolation on the issue of settlements may lead to more engagement from the international community. |
| In Beijing, they celebrate when they have a “blue sky day”—when the haze clears long enough so that you can actually see the sun. The view for the inhabitant’s of Washington is obscured by a different kind of smog. Call it money pollution. |
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A conversation with Staal, author of the new book Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life, on Susan Faludi’s accusations in Harper’s of feminism’s ritual matricide, the health of the movement, and whether Sarah Palin should be attaching herself to it. |
| Budget deficits are a ruse to conservatives. What they really want to do is change the basis of American life. |
| The problem isn’t that “we’ve” been spending too much. It’s that most Americans have been getting a steadily smaller share of the nation’s total income. |
| Seven funny folks have changed their lives for progressivism — some on purpose, some not so much — and made us laugh in the process. |
 | In the wake of revolution in Egypt, a first-generation Egyptian-American questions what her heritage means now. |
| An on-the-ground report of the growing violence in Tripoli as told to Robin Yassin-Kassab. The source remains nameless for her own safety. |
| Egypt is closer to Syrian hearts than it seems on the map. If a democratic, non-sectarian Egypt reclaims its regional role, profound change in Syria will be a matter of time. So the regime needs to get a move on. |
| Here’s a simple truth Americans seem to have lost touch with: greater security doesn’t come from fighting more wars; it comes from fighting fewer of them or none at all. |
Radiohead singer Thom Yorke always manages to find a new, not just melody but melodic language to sing in.
| Tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. EST, Hillary Clinton will deliver the inaugural Richard C. Holbrooke Address on U.S. relations with Afghanistan and Pakistan at the Asia Society, honoring the former Asia Society Chairman who was President Obama’s envoy to the Af/Pak region. |
| If the Obama's budget is passed, its five-year freeze on domestic programs will reduce spending to the lowest level since Eisenhower left office in 1961. |
 | At a time when camera phones and digital cameras are turning us all into documentarians—a world in which the New Republic’s Jed Perl asks whether photojournalism is a thing of the past—can World Press Photo’s award-winning images show us anything we don’t already know? |
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The second installment of Guernica editor-at-large Mark Dowie’s interview series features Mark Krasny, who explores what we lose when we no longer believe in God. |
 | Marclay’s latest is tied so closely to the metronome of real life that it manages to exist in the same time and space as a viewer in a new way. |
| What is at stake for Americans in the Bahrain unrest? |
For over 30 years, we gave Egypt the shaft, because it was in our national interest to do so. Now it’s time for Egypt to find out where its own interests are, without a strongman leading the way. The country has a difficult and terrible road to walk.
| Qaddafi thinks he’s a lady-killing revolutionary of Guevara proportions and a tyrant of the stature of Mao. At the same time, he thinks the people are in control of Libya’s destiny. And perhaps—we can hope after Tunisia and Egypt—he’s right. |
| Memo to President Obama: Given the absence of intelligent intelligence, it’s not surprising that your handling of the Egyptian uprising has set new standards for foreign policy incompetence. Perhaps a primer on how to judge the power of mass protest will better prepare for the next round of political upheavals. |
| Pascal's Wager, which says it's better to believe in God just in case, is one of the most common arguments in favor of religion—too bad it's illogical and trivializes both faith and reality. |
Improvisation, if you’re eviscerated, is quasi-strange.
| For years progressives have whined that Democratic presidents compromise with Republicans while Republican presidents stand their ground. Isn’t it about time progressives had the courage of our conviction and got behind what we believe in? |
| Three percent of Brazil’s population owns two-thirds of the country’s farmable land. However, the Landless Workers’ Movement can lay claim to finding land for more than 350,000 families in over 2000 settlements. |
The U.S. poet laureate, W.S. Merwin, discusses his role in the antiwar movement, the quagmire of U.S. military occupations, today’s extinction rate, and efforts to conserve nature on Maui.
| Who would have thought that New York City, the nation’s most populous city, often perceived as lumbering when it comes to change, would be a cutting-edge innovator in transportation and the future of open space? |
| Mrs. Obama’s vision for healthy food is at best fragmented and at worst a failure. She does not address the root causes of our broken food system, where a few powerful players make all of the decisions about what we eat and write the rules for the economic survival of independent producers. |
| Like vultures descending on a rotting corpse, [big business have] come up with a variety of innovative methods to pull the last scraps of meat off the bones of America's middle-class. |
| This brouhaha over spending cuts is the wrong debate about the wrong thing at the wrong time. |
| An insider's account of Cairo now that Mubarak is gone. |
| A young Palestinian incarcerated for constructing a bomb earns a liberal arts-style education in prison with an emphasis on reading, discussion, reflection, democracy, solidarity, and equality. |
| “Arab Tunis rose up. Inspired by Tunis, mighty Egypt rose. Today American control over the Arab region is collapsing. Palestine faces a different future to the one it faced yesterday. The Arab nation is back.” |
| As one of Manning’s childhood friends from Crescent, Oklahoma, has testified, “He wanted to serve his country.” It’s up to you to decide whether he did. |
| Neil Genzlinger of the NYT charges that the contemporary memoir is dull, “unexceptional,” and evidence of “the current age of oversharing.” Maybe. But what about speaking for the unheard? |
 | The inaugural episode of Guernica editor-at-large Mark Dowie’s interview series features sociologist Todd Gitlin, who argues that the relationship between America and Israel is steeped in the belief that both nations were “chosen” by God. |
| Here’s another instance of where the White House’s attempt to preempt Republican rhetoric ends up legitimizing it—and reframing the public debate around an issue that’s hardly central to what ails America. |
| Obama and the Chamber of Commerce promise to abide by the deep, abiding beliefs of America, but after following the Chamber for years, Robert Reich just thinks it has a deep, abiding belief in cutting taxes on the wealthy and taking the nation back to the days before the New Deal. |
| Everyone loves to watch a hot babe going batshit crazy. At least that’s what the astronomical success of Black Swan would have you believe… |
 | This post’s author considers the relationship between those events big and small that constitute fodder for journalism and the stories embedded in any news line. |
 | Former editor of Harper’s Magazine Roger Hodge speaks about his former employer, John “Rick” MacArthur, the current state of Harper’s, and why Obama’s State of the Union was “appalling.” |
| When people are facing a dim future, in a country hijacked by a corrupt regime that destabilized its economy…waiting doesn’t cut it. |
| Just as the NFL championship trophy returned to its roots with Vince Lombardi returning to Green Bay for the first time in 14 seasons, another standout of last night’s Super Bowl broadcast reminded the world where manufacturing innovation was invented — Detroit. |
| Almost 20 years after the lesser superpower of the Cold War left the world stage, the “victor” is now lurching down the declinist slope, this time as the other defeated power of the Cold War era. |
| The AWP conference is over, and we are all happy to get back to our regularly scheduled programming. But just in case you didn’t get to spend a lot of time gawking at others, here’s a small people-watching checklist, complete with (not-so-covertly taken) photos. |
| According to the Turkish government, singer Ferhat Tunc is a bad man. His crime? He sang kinda nice stuff about peace. How terrible. |
| Social Security and Medicare aren’t broccoli or asparagus. They’re as American as hot dogs and apple pie. |
| Over the last decade, the FBI has been found to violate the Constitution countless times under the guise of the Patriot Act. |
| …each person comes to understand what role he will play, and so each can consistently select and reproduce, through all the decades and changes of fashion, the appropriate style and wardrobe, for the rest of his life. |
| For two decades now we’ve been ignoring the impassioned pleas of scientists that our burning of fossil fuels was a bad idea. And now we’re paying a heavy price. |
| What happened to John Boehner’s $100 billion budget-cutting commitment? What became of Paul Ryan’s big ideas? Where did all the roaring and raging on the right during the 2010 election go? |
| Jill Richardson discusses the hardships faced by the immigrant women who put food on America’s table. |
| Don’t be fooled. The American economy isn’t back.While Wall Street’s bull market is making America’s rich even richer, most Americans continue to be mired in a worsening housing crisis. |
| The problem is, thanks to the art world, porn, movies, television, and men’s and women’s magazines alike, the fallen, nude, waxed woman is a trope everyone knows. |
| “I will make a prediction: if this revolution fails, America will face an unprecedented wave of Arab anger, and Egypt will be plagued by violence from now on.” |
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Last week David Kato, an openly gay activist in Uganda, was brutally murdered after a local paper published his name and photograph. Glenna Gordon speaks about the effects of Kato’s death within Uganda’s gay community. |
Guest editor Deb Olin Unferth offers insights into the art of the memoir and introduces the present and future stars of the genre.
| One of the aspects of the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia that has not received much attention—not surprisingly—is the role Arabic poetry has played. At times like these, the right poetry and song doesn’t merely describe how people are feeling; it can actually be an intensifier that helps a protest spread and solidify. |
Homeschoolers like to think of themselves as patriotic trailblazers, but what it really means is they don’t teach their kids about sex, evolution, or global warming.
Did you know that more people jack off than pick their nose while driving?
An ear that seldom errs. Seldom, not never.
When my mother had her second cancer operation, I was in Africa. Gita was angry, because I hadn’t come back from my trip.
| “A lot of the interest comes from a sense that the city of Detroit isn’t just an exception to the rule of the United States…that Detroit is, in some sense, the future of American cities…” |
| The degree to which Ayn Rand has become a touchstone for the modern conservative movement is striking. |
| Investing in education and technology are all well and good, but what about our nation's biggest problem, the scourge of high unemployment? |
| Guernica is partnering with Dzanc Books to sponsor the first annual DISQUIET: International Literary Program Award. The winner of the award will be published in Guernica, will receive airfare, accommodations, and tuition for the program of writing workshops in Lisbon. |
| Egypt’s Friday of Rage was a beautiful revolutionary moment. While uncertainty remains, that energy has been unleashed…and it’s not about to jump back in the bottle. |
| Whether you’re an old-fashioned imperialist running dog or you’ve made a real effort to disregard the game, this is the Super Bowl to watch. Never before have so many loose strands of an unraveling empire come together in a single event accessible to those who mourn or cheer America. |
 | Cherien Dabis ended her 2009 Guernica interview with: “I am lucky enough to have yet another story in me that I really want to tell, so I am working on that.” This unnamed project became May in the Summer and earned Dabis an award for visionary filmmakers. |
| Juan Cole discusses the uprising in Egypt—both what it means for the citizens, and what it means for the United States. |
| For me, all this tiger parent business started before Amy Chua's article. It started when I was rejected from Yale—something Chua's daughter will never experience— and wondered for the first time if it's better to have choices, even if you sometimes make the wrong ones. |
 | Teenagers deserve to have a moderately accurate portrayal of their lives, one that bothers to understand their psyches and problems, that reflects both the joys and consequences of their actions. Instead, MTV handed them a caricature of themselves. |
| Since unemployment is a regular feature of a free market system, let’s not mystify it. And let’s also not pretend that the cure for it is as mysterious as the cure for cancer. |
| The essential facts remain: U.S. military outlays today equal that of every other nation on the planet combined, a situation without precedent in modern history. |
 | That Jared Loughner is so crazy we can’t look for motive is the same story Bush shilled after September 11. But files found on Loughner’s computer suggest he won’t be getting off on an insanity plea. |
| Amidst the upward mobility of the outer, Pizza-Hut-and-Tony-Romas suburbs, and the relentless, grinding poverty of San Salvador, the ghosts of a U.S.-funded war haunt every intersection, neighborhood, and café. |
| Fifty years ago, then-President Kennedy handed his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver an unwanted project called the Peace Corp. Shriver took the gift, and made it one of the most popular and endearing trademarks of that administration. |
| Despite the Obama administration's abandonment of the phrase “war on terror,” the impulses encoded in it still powerfully shape Washington’s policy-making… |
| Most Americans no longer have the purchasing power to get the economy moving again. Once the debt bubble burst, they were stranded. |
| What about the towns that don’t have a multi-million dollar advertising campaign behind them? How do they move forward? |
| Why the Ms. Magazine blog’s attempt at proving Jared Loughner acted predominantly out of hate for women is a bit…misguided. |
| The Obama administration is trying to make American products more competitive; Robert Reich explains the ways we can measure what that really means. |
| In a new interview with Ann Curry, Burmese opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi signals her party will finally reexamine the efficacy of sanctions. Guernica editor Joel Whitney explains why Burma sanctions, and sanctions in general, may soon become obsolete. |
 | 2011 is looking grim. From now on, rising prices, powerful storms, severe droughts and floods, and other unexpected events are likely to play havoc with the fabric of global society, producing chaos and political unrest. Get ready for a rocky year. |
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With all the anger in America right now, why have our well-crafted words seemingly fallen on deaf ears? Is it that we have nothing to say or that what we say is no longer connected to the blood flowing through our country? Or is it even simpler: the modern American novel is no longer about debate, but about appeasing an audience. |
 | Since leaving prison, Burgess’s marketable skill stabilized her while she explored her options. She’s always talking about what’s next. Still, she’s learned that her past won’t just disappear. |
| A day after being detained at the Nigerian airport, critic Okey Ndibe learned that it was all an accident, just a little misunderstanding over the issue of that pesky enemies list with his name on it. |
 | Religious historian Ira Chernus discusses the myths people tell to make sense of the chaos of their lives—myths of the enemy, myths of security—and how these have ensnared Washington itself. |
 | Being a congressional staffer is like being a human metonym—someone transparent, someone communicated through—and this is why the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords wounds us all. |
| Karen-Burmese author/activist Zoya Phan worries that an ascendant Aung San Suu Kyi might get assassinated, chides nostalgia for pre-colonial Burma, where minorities were oppressed, and calls sanctions busters naive or stupid. |
 | How does journalism intersect with literature? For the author of this post, it’s a question that’s taken years to answer. |
| Six are dead in Tucson, and the country is outraged. Sixteen are killed in Kabul, and there’s nary a thought for the deceased. Tom Engelhardt discusses how Americans are quick to protect their own, but care little for Afghan innocents. |
| There are plenty of female heroes in real life, but what about those fictional characters that usurp our daydreams? |
| In case you haven’t heard, the gap between the rich and poor in the U.S. is currently wider than it’s been since the Great Depression. So, why isn’t there more support for attempting to alleviate it by taxing the rich? |
| Leary, author of this issue’s “Detroitism,” offers reading recommendations for putting together Detroit’s story, as well as the increasingly-familiar story of urban America in an era of prolonged economic crisis. |
| David Brock’s appeal to logic and rationale after the Tucson shootings and Palin’s immediately infamous cries of “blood libel.” |
| Between the Twitter hype surrounding David Wojnarowicz’s film, A Fire In My Belly, and the Flickr photos of Ai WeiWei’s demolished Shanghai studio, artists are proving the power of social media to spur a real revolution. |
 | Over the past few years, 19 people have been killed and 26 wounded all over the country by white gunmen with ties to racist or right-wing groups or who harbored deep suspicions of “the government.” So, do we call them terrorists or “deranged” Americans? |
| The networks are filled with reports commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death, but few discuss the human rights and economic issues that he fought for in life. |
Ending malaria in Africa any time soon is nearly hopeless. And in trying, Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Gates may be doing more harm than good.
[T]he observatories beneath the moon of Jaipur and Delhi, the black ribbon of migrations, the eels in the middle of the street or in the stalls in a theatre...
| The Tunisian Revolution is potentially more consequential than the Iranian one was thirty years ago. Yet, even with an alliance of frustrated BA holders, professionals, workers, farmers, progressives and Muslim activists, it remains to be seen if little Tunisia is the start of something, or one more false dawn. |
| As of January 2011, Beacon Press has reissued four books by Martin Luther King, Jr. to introduce King to a new generation of readers, to show aspects of King that are fresh and original, and to underscore how astonishingly relevant he continues to be today. |
| The sad news from Afghanistan is that a great many progressives have already figured out their own exit strategy. Like generations of Afghans before them, they will become part of one of the world’s largest diasporas from a single country. |
| The American Library Association has proven that at least they have their shit together by taking a positive stand on the public’s right to government “transparency” and an “access to information.” |
| Blasphemy laws are objectionable on their face, but they aren’t limited to a few Muslim-majority countries. They also exist in Christendom. |
| In the same way that a direct action physically interrupts a target’s business-as-usual, a campaign has a deeper impact when it also interrupts the dominant narrative about the campaign issue. |
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Have you noticed that Lockheed Martin, the giant weapons corporation, is shadowing you? If not, then you haven’t been paying much attention. Let’s just say that, if you have a life, Lockheed Martin is likely a (big) part of it. |
| We can talk all we want about the need to regain a sense of civility, but civility will reappear only when we demand it. |
 | Berman’s project was shot in in Kabul when the Taliban was Afghanistan’s official government. Goldenberg came across her photographs while researching images for J. Malcom Garcia’s most recent piece in Guernica, “Bed 18.” |
| In a WikiLeaks world where almost all information is a click away, nobody knows the answer to one seemingly simple question: Does the United States really have more than one thousand military bases across the globe? |
| Here's a deliciously ironic turn of events: First, columnist Okey Ndibe criticizes the Nigerian government for human rights and elections breaches. Then, the Nigerian government arrests him because they're tired of his criticism. Next up, election in April. |
| The Republicans wanted controversy over the health-care law, now let's see how the White House showdown will pan out. |
| Sure, art is supposed to make us a little uncomfortable. But the “Drowning the Dolls” project, in which an artist paints “drowning” Barbie Dolls, may only be perpetuating bad vibes. |
| The Classic American Novel, Huckleberry Finn has weathered centuries of controversy. The latest one—removing the '‘n’-word to make the book appeal to educators—is a well-intentioned mistake that changes the author's intention and the role of academics to wrestle with difficult issues. |
| Are we truly the world’s greatest fighting force, not only at this moment, but as measured against all militaries across history? If so, on what basis is this claim made? And what does such triumphalist rhetoric suggest, not just about our national narcissism, but Washington’s priorities? |
| The Republican version of class warfare is to pit private-sector workers against public servants. They’d rather set average working people against one another. (And they also would rather you didn’t know they want to cut taxes on the rich even more.) |
| It’s easy to forget that war is a drug. But eventually, Washington, the Pentagon, and the U.S. military will have to enter rehab. They desperately need a twelve-step program for recovery. Until then, the delusions and the madness that go with surge addiction are not likely to end. |
| Can there be a “humanitarian mission” where fighters are bored and disillusioned when a patrol doesn’t involve a fight, the taking of possibly innocent lives? What security does a NATO-mission bring, if villagers are too scared to talk to the security forces for fear of repercussions from the Taliban? |
| George Orwell once explained that when a public is stressed and confused, a Big Lie told repeatedly can become the accepted truth. Only the President has the bully pulpit. But will he use it to tell the Big Truth? |
| When seen through the lens of the commons, public services cannot be dismissed as “waste” nor basic matters of fairness reduced to “entitlements.” |
 | The writer of “Bed 18”, one of this issue’s features, talks about reporting on self-immolation in a country where years of war and poverty have made grief and suffering “so common that loss no longer evokes shock.” |
| Juan Cole discusses Wikleaks documents revealing that Israel, driven by a fear of stockpiles of rockets in Gaza, is preparing for a major war. |
Our author was in Afghanistan to report on women who set themselves on fire to protest their social status. Then it got personal.
Two star novelists on bringing back wrong and right, micro and macro writing, and David Foster Wallace.
June’s winter, ivory-rinsed blue, // a wild dog tugs a sock of skin /
down an impala’s stick-leg penciling skyward
 | This year, Chhabra fulfilled a lifelong desire to attend film festivals around the world. Here is his list of the ten best international films released in theaters in the U.S. |
| Twenty-five of Guernica’s most popular pieces from 2010. |
| Juan Cole discusses the news that rabbis are issuing letters warning against interfaith marriage, and puts it in the context of the Middle East. |
 | Twenty subscription-free favorites on South Asia, gender, and Islam in 2010. |
| Whether 2011 is a great year economically depends which economy you’re in—the one that’s rising with the profits of big business and Wall Street, or the one that will continue to struggle with few jobs and lousy wages. |
| Next week starts the new Congress, and with it the Tea Party conservatives. What’s their strategy? What will they rally around? |
| Sean Thomas-Breitfeld explains the paradox of job loss and record-breaking profits, and why we need a cooperative economy. |
| Portland’s success in promoting bicycling can be imitated in other U.S. cities—and perhaps surpassed. |
 | On the Bowery does a piercing job of making the audience feel the misery of street life in nineteen fifties New York. Though the dehumanizing effects of homeless and poverty are no longer seen as frequently on today’s Bowery, the film still reminds us of all those who are left behind. |
| How can you creatively recycle unused items? ReUseConnection has an idea. |
| Photographer Michael Lanza interviews National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis about the greatest threat to the park system that we have ever faced. |
 | “I get that discussing the nuances of consensual sex versus non-consensual sex might seem like a luxury, when every week brings its raft of gang rapes, call-center rapes, caste-conflict-inspired rapes, the casual rapes of sex workers, the routine rape of Dalit women, or women in conflict zones to our attention. But the right to give or withdraw one’s consent is not a small thing.” |
| The BP oil disaster of 2010 is far from being over, so let’s stop calling it a spill. We spill milk. When millions of barrels of oil pour into one of the world’s most unique ecosystems and pulls apart thousands of lives, it’s called a disaster. (Part 2) |
| Washington may be more “business friendly,” but there’s one problem. America’s big businesses are less and less American. |
| Rebecca Solnit acknowledges the activists and workers who work to ensure that another, better world is not just possible, but has been here all along. |
| For thirty-five years, editors from small lit mags and book presses have nominated six authors—be they poets, fiction writers, essayists, etc.—for the Pushcart Prize. We are one such lit mag, and we are thrilled to announce our nominees. |
| Now that DADT is repealed and fear-mongering on gays won't win elections, Juan Cole argues that the shift will lead to hate-mongering against Muslims. |
| David Morris explains why this week could mark the beginning of the end of Social Security as we know it. |
| Why the new tax deal is a copy of Reagan’s notorious, and failed, “starve the beast” campaign. |
| I do know the one place where the president’s reasonable compromises simply won’t work—a place where we have absolutely no choice but to steer by abstract ideals. That place is the climate. |
In its early days, WikiLeaks dropped leaks from around the world and helped Obama clear his name as he campaigned for president. Doesn’t this repudiate the notion that it is strictly an anti-U.S. outfit?.
| In October 2010, Thinakaran took a road trip from Washington, DC to a small town called Buras, sixty miles from where the BP Deepwater Horizon exploded in April. She wanted to document how this small town was coping. (Part 1) |
Jamaica’s dancehall music is being blamed for the country’s violent attacks on gays. But there are many who don’t see the music as homophobic, only the battle cry of a changing nation. Part 2 of 2.
my father has always had / a fear of being swallowed / whether by a large reptile or the earth
Early Zionist writing evoked the tragic male hero, bound by the cruel destiny of his people and himself. It’s true of many contemporary works, including Kushner and Spielberg’s Munich.
Just in time for the holidays, a new CD compiles a who’s who of banned musicians from around the world.
| Big Money is booming and Wall Street is back, but American workers are losing even more bargaining power as profit goes into software that can do what people used to do — but more cheaply. Why? |
| Welcome to Congress, 2011. Terrorists are Muslims, Muslims are immigrants, immigrants are residents. Anyone and everyone is a suspect. That is the reality played out at every airport; it is the narrative touched by every monitored email and tapped telephone call. |
| While hosting a radio show in the United Arab Emirates, the author of this post encounters a double standard about love marriages. |
| “On passing a newsstand these days I think of funeral parlors and Tutankhamen’s tomb. The celebrities pictured on the covers of the magazines line up as if in a row of ceremonial grave goods, exquisitely prepared for burial within the tomb of a democratic republic that died of eating disco balls.” |
 | What the Wikileaks revelations tell us about how Washington runs Pakistan. |
 | All children need government policies that optimally serve their physical, emotional, and educational needs. That’s the gay rights position the author of this post champions. |
| The true horror of the casualties of war may lie in the fact that Americans aren’t even calling for an explanation. |
 | Evidence of the Obama administration’s “moral collapse” is profuse; the pattern is clear, the consequences already terrible. |
 | The author and Burma scholar breaks down Burma's recent elections, the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, and why Burma needs development and trade and not sanctions. |
 | A soft landing for America four years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. |
| A lot of the money that drives the Mexican drug trafficking that has led to the deaths of over twenty-eight thousand people since 2006 is in marijuana. Most of the marijuana grown in Mexico winds up in the United States. |
| James Franco’s Palo Alto is a good way to pass the time on that long stretch on the D train between 125th St. and Columbus Circle. But it’s probably not canon worthy. |
| Until lawmakers cap the amount of money in politics, while forcing donors to reveal their identities and not hide in the shadows, the New Oligarchy will only grow in stature and influence. Never before has the United States looked so much like a country of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. |
| Unless the President and Democrats explain why the economy still stinks for most Americans and offer a plan to fix it, the Republican explanation and solution will prevail. |
The U.S. postal service is struggling for survival and broadcast airwaves feed hate. How two key information commons, “owned” by citizens, have dammed the flow of communication and birthed Rush Limbaugh.
Put your foot / in that water, and you’ll lose a toe, / or worse, a whole foot.
Jamaica’s dancehall music is being blamed for the country’s violent attacks on gays. But there are many who don’t see the music as homophobic, only the battle cry of a changing nation. Part 1 of 2.
| A 2007 cable shows that Israeli politicians fear that even if Iran never used a nuclear weapon, just for it to have one would doom Israel. |
 | As long as Americans don’t grasp the connections between our war state and our “safety,” things will only get worse |
 | To understand just how bad the 112th Congress is likely to be for peace on Earth, one has to understand how incredibly awful the 110th and 111th Congresses were. Oddly enough, doing so brings some surprising silver linings into view. |
 | In a democracy, people have a right to know what their government is actually doing. In a pseudo-democracy, a bunch of fairy tales from high places will do the trick. What kind of “national security” can be built on duplicity from a government that is discredited and refuted by its own documents? |
 | As jobless benefits begin to lapse in two weeks, we must ask ourselves why reward the people at the top with an extension of the Bush tax cut that will blow a hole in the budget deficit? And why fail to extend jobless benefits to hardworking Americans who got the boot? |
| “In my nineteen fifties childhood, there was a cheesy (if thrilling) sci-fi flick, The Incredible Shrinking Man…In recent weeks, without a radioactive cloud in sight, the date for serious drawdowns of American troops in Afghanistan has followed a similar path toward the vanishing point.” |
 | In this excerpt from Eboo Patel’s acclaimed memoir, Acts of Faith, Patel shares a story of pilgrimage, cultural and religious diversity, and compromise from the life of the Prophet. |
| The best way to defeat right-wing xenophobic “populism” is to build genuine progressive populism. In the process, we can draw on the spirit of the New Deal. |
 | The deepest principle of American justice is being tested in the wake of the Ghailani verdict. With terrorism trials, the more serious they get, the more the presumption of innocence seems to lie at the mercy of politics. |
 | The political right are not the only ones to embrace the “clash of civilizations” between the West and the Islamic world—the left has done so as well through it’s doctrine of multiculturalism. |
 | While American infrastructure crumbles at home, new construction continues in oil-rich kingdoms, sultanates, and emirates there, courtesy of the Pentagon. |
Will protecting an endangered toad trump Tanzania’s need for energy and development?
| A year ago, Pakistani Christian Asia Bibi was arrested on blasphemy charges in the conservative Punjab province. This past week she was sentenced to death. The specifics of her crime? Publicly stating her religion. |
 | Transgender athletes make a good case for why sports should be inclusive—regardless of gender—in the U.S. |
| It’s always nice to talk about international cooperation, but the truth is much more needs to be done to ease tensions that are moving the global economy closer to the brink of outright protectionism. The key responsibility falls to China and America—both internationally and domestically. |
| You must have had a moment when you thought to yourself: It really isn’t going to end, is it? For the author of this post, the U.S. military’s $511 million plan for a massive expansion of the U.S. embassy in Kabul inspired one of those moments of hopelessness. |
 | How and why President Obama is in danger of losing control of his South Asian foreign policy agenda to India, its Republican supporters in the House, and the military-industrial complex. |
| While the economy of Wall Street big-wigs and corporate execs is recovering nicely, the economy of the average American worker continues to plummet. Here’s why. |
 | Is Palestine America’s next Vietnam? Like all historical analogies, it’s far from perfect. But where else in the world is American weaponry and political power so obviously used to suppress a Viet Cong-like movement of national liberation? |
 | As long as our unfinished wars still burn in the collective consciousness—and still rage in Kabul, Baghdad, Sana’a, and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan—Islamophobia will make its impact felt in our media, politics, and daily life. |
 | For too long, appeasement has been the name of the game when it comes to dealing with China. The Norwegians changed that on Friday by saluting Liu Xiaobo with the Nobel Peace Prize, which has eluded everyone engaged in the struggle for a less repressive China. |
 | Tomorrow, November 6th, Fordham University at Lincoln Center is hosting Turning Tides: A Symposium on Diasporic Literatures, a creative and scholarly conference that will highlight three different legacies of diaspora in the United States: Haiti, The Philippines and Puerto Rico. |
 | Freedom Now, the international legal group that represents 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo, filed a petition with the United Nations that aims to prove that the Nobel Laureate and his wife’s respective detentions violate international law. |
 | Would the behavior of political actors be different if both sides fully realized that an electoral “mandate” is a very frail and short-lived creature? |
 | The morning of Wednesday, November 3rd was a sad one for this author. So, she went for a jog in Prospect Park, a space that she calls “an image of democracy.” |
| The election of 2010 is now grim history. It’s time for progressives to go back to the grassroots and organize with renewed, deepened commitment to changing the direction of this country. |
| “Whether the country I once wanted to represent was ever there in the form I imagined is a question I’ll leave to the historians…What remains, angry or depressed, has made for a toxic brew as well as the most dispiriting election of my life.”—Tom Engelhardt’s ballot box blues for November 2010. |
 | This election night, please join Guernica in celebrating the launch of fiction writer E.C. Osondu’s debut collection, Voice of America. |
Guest Editor Emily Fragos introduces six poets who write about family incarnations—Matthew Zapruder, Cynthia Cruz, Gabriel Fried, Mark Wunderlich, Lynn Melnick, and Jennifer Franklin.
Got my enzymes, a nickel bag of / Electrolytes. My entire life, / I’ve been waiting for this.
| The political center isn’t about what we decide. It’s about how we decide. |
From Tijuana east, Ed Vulliamy traces a violent drug war, spreading repression condoned by the U.S., a wall that separates family members, a water supply shut off, and the worship of Holy Death. From his new book.
He’s not old, but he is / too old to live with his sisters / for no reason.
When thistles spring up in the field / of our marriage, when the noxious vine // twines onto the maple, let us pull it up / by its roots.
During 2009’s post-election protests in Tehran, one man is struck into a commitment to the cause.
We aren’t native to this land. / It’s time to plant what is. It’s time to go home.
Thin arm around my neck. It doesn’t look / Strong enough to hold a small animal; but it is.
 | The road may be bumpy, but unlike the new wave movement of the eighties, today’s indie films are here to stay. |
As Gulf fishermen are forced to work for the oil company that destroyed their livelihoods, who will train Louisiana’s next generation to fish?
 | For Okey Ndibe, two of Nigeria’s most well-known authors, Chinua Achebe and Wole Sonyinka, are personal saviors. First of Ndibe’s career, and then of Christmas 1997. |
| In the midst of American election frenzy, a one-man tip sheet on the “global midterms”—prospective winners, losers, and those “on the cusp.” |
 | No matter how overwhelmed by the tyranny of emblems and dentist office walls, aura persists. Under the right circumstances, it is perceivable to even the most desensitized eye. |
 | This country is run for the benefit of alien life forms. They’ve invaded; they’ve infiltrated; they’ve conquered; and a lot of the most powerful people on Earth do their bidding. |
| When our elected representatives can’t and won’t come up with a real jobs program, the Fed feels pressed to come up with a fake one that blows another financial bubble. |
| How the proliferation of forward operating bases in Afghanistan signal no end in sight for the nine-year-long war. |
The Ministry of Hot Water / has posted an opening: Director. / Well, why not, we can take that on.
How New York’s worst day led to its greatest photography exhibit ever.
That woman who spreads her legs, / who is beaten, who cannot hold / her grief or her drink. / Don’t become that woman.
Amina Janjua and the search for thousands of disappeared Pakistanis swept up in the U.S. and Pakistan’s “War on Terror”—in 15 scenes.
 | Join Guernica for an evening filled with food, drinks, music, readings, auctions, celebrities, honorees, and more fun than should be allowed at a benefit. |
Want to become a poet? Spend a summer roofing under the Florida sun.
The grand mental institutions of the nineteenth century long ago emptied of all inhabitants, but their skeletons still mark our psychic and physical landscape.
They do not walk around with their arms and legs locked stiffly. They can be saved.
There’s a box at the hospital in which to deposit / children unlikely to win the Nobel Prize.
From stepped up drone attacks, backsliding on torture, the Afghan surge, has Obama doubled down on Bush’s bets? Editor Joel Whitney interviews Tariq Ali on his new book. Recorded live at Asia Society.
Our fiction editor’s theory on New York as a place of neutrality and a refuge from soul crushing lunches at Applebee’s…and his call for proselytizing Christians to leave New Yorkers alone.
 | The Asia Society presents a live interview with Tariq Ali and Guernica editor Joel Whitney on Friday, September 17, on Obama's foreign policy and the legacy of Bush. |
because I hate your every-now-and-then anthems, / because I hate the smell of your socks in the stone mihrabs.
Opportunistic speculators are eying Nepal’s burgeoning hydropower potential. Does wealth or woe lie ahead for the poverty-stricken nation?
After successfully employing Islamic law in the U.S. court system, our writer realizes that Sharia and feminism aren’t always mutually exclusive.
We played Steal the Bacon / and explored our unmentionables /
behind the gazebo
In response to Nick Turse’s critique of his recent war documentary Restrepo, Hetherington fires back: “I think his opinion of what needs to be said about the war has clouded his viewing of the film.”
He says: look yourself up in the guide and tell me what you are.
After she was raped in the Navy, Maricela Guzman survived an abusive marriage, PTSD, and an attempted suicide. Now she’s fighting to make sure it won’t happen to other women.
| With two superfluous remakes soon to make their way to a theater near you, Wright takes a look at the top five movies that did not need do-overs. |
After two rounds of presidential voting, Colombia inaugurated “the warrior,” Juan Manuel Santos, last week. Did the country avoid the voter fraud so prevalent in Latin America? A from-the-ground report.
Then he remembered / That he couldn’t remember // If he had toes. What a relief.
When he was young and looking for a little direction, our writer turned to the Navy. There, he found many more questions than answers.
If we didn’t have the military jobs program, the U.S. unemployment rate would be over 11.5 percent today. But wouldn’t it be better to have a jobs program that created things we really need?
August 9 is International Day of the World’s Indigenous People. With an indigenous uprising last month in Brazil, Survival International’s Joanna Eede celebrates the world’s first peoples in a new book.
| Reich responds to the “rhetorical vacuity” in the Wall Street Journal’s Letters to the Editor. |
In a new book about the global war on terror, Amitava Kumar shows how criminal guilt has been sacrificed to the political need to haul in suspects. The result? Through crude character assassination, guilt is essentially fabricated after the arrest.
From his new book, Michael Mandelbaum lays out the challenge of the U.S.’s activist foreign policy, including an expensive war on terror, in an age of economic retraction and pending entitlements.
More than 100 years ago, scientists were concerned about global warming. What they forecast is happening, only faster.
...there / was always a lucky one, who carried with him / the mistakes of others, what a burden / it must have been that pushed him down, / but he was pleased by all this pushing.
Photos from Guernica's reading in Union Square Park that featured Alexander Chee, Joshua Kors, and Terese Svoboda
A few of the prison reforms / you wrestled into implementation // in Madrid, will take root /
in the rest of the world
Some Pakistanis have begun blaming Afghan immigrants for bringing “their” war into Pakistan—one Afghan baker’s story of harassment, corruption, and exile.
International adoption is not always the unambiguous act of altruism it might seem. In Guatemala, it may be creating orphans.
A New Yorker finds she may be just one degree of separation from a famed impostor.
“Call me the Great Rejector. But don't take the rejection personally.”
Applying the ideas of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry to present day Rwanda, our author argues that reconciliation after genocide is just another form of torture.
Part 2 of a new translation excerpt of the major South American writer’s novel.
I understand this economically, and I’d rather not / mention the resemblance to prostitution, but when I open my / mouth it also fills with something called sky
In Vietnam she was a rich woman, but in the U.S. she toiled stocking convenience store shelves. Why did Thao decide to immigrate?
“There was still a residual paranoia and I could not tell what was real and what was delusional…[Death] is there. It’s fundamentally always there, not as a fixation or believed-in solution but a drift, a tendency.”
Men suddenly become meek. / Damn, we all needed it badly.
The esteemed historian and novelist on how there is only one path for the United States in Afghanistan: withdrawal.
A year after the Green Movement in Iran (and the day after Flag Day in the United States), an Iranian-American artist with 44 flags wonders where to call home.
Given the recent major acts of idiocy (the BP fiasco), it's about time we studied stupidity and kept the chronically dense (Palin & co.) from destroying our world.
The Burma expert defends aid, diplomacy, and “understanding” Burma’s dictators in order to improve human rights, sway softliners, and save lives.
In Maoist China, a political prisoner feels his way through a Kafkaesque tableau of rumors, betrayal, interrogation, and execution.
Little boys in drifts of dulling orange were trying / to pack balls of wings to throw at each other; / she thought perhaps she wouldn't have children.
Samuel Fuller had a pulp-fiction mindset and the former tabloid-reporter's tendency to think in screaming headlines.
The polemicist discusses Tariq Ramadan’s love of extremist sheikhs, Islamism’s ties to Hitler, and the intellectual confusion of liberal journalists.
In the 1970s Israel needed friends, and South Africa needed weapons. From a new book, the story of their secret alliance.
It had been such a small thing, the thing that made them split up, the thing she later cited as the reason she’d left him.
Tonight, you are thinking of heroin, / Of the boy who pulled you to his lips / In a blue room and whispered heroin / So close you could feel it on your face like a cloudburst.
Europe is struggling to come to terms with its Muslim minority. What are the consequences of the intolerance and the violence for the continent and for literature? Paul Berman and a lauded panel chime in.
What does the disembodied head say to the world, to passersby, to itself? In the final essay in her six-part series, Menghraj discusses saints, icons, and presence of mind in the absence of brain.
Chomsky discusses the unpeople in Iraq, the U.S., and Latin America, clever uses of the internet and international solidarity, and the conversion of a liberal dove to a principled anti-warrior.
The night before a bike ride that would change his life irrevocably, Paul Guest imagined his heartbreaking fate.
The mammoth and the dodo never saw it coming— / in the end, there is only the idea of species, like a chair / left swinging when the kids go in for lunch.
Why were there only 8 women on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century? Why is only 3% of the literature Americans read in translation?
Are others curious why Rush chose a female voice? I’m hoping this matter will be approached during the April 26 Guernica/PEN event where he’ll be a panelist.
These big brass records are the heartbeat of HBO’s new show Treme.
Thanks to a history of scarcity in a hostile region, Israel is poised to lead the world in clean technology.
It’s not navel-gazing MFA graduates who are killing literary fiction, says Jay Nicorvo. It’s blockbuster-hungry book editors and their habit of anticipating anticipations. A response to Ted Genoways in Mother Jones.
The rock icon on song cycles, cycling, and escaping the past with Imelda Marcos. And you may ask yourself, is this my beautiful new business model?
Trying to translate a 400-year old masterpiece like Don Quixote into modern English would be folly, even Quixotic. But that’s what Edith Grossman does. A foolhardy essay for April Fools’ Day.
Need to pick a good prison? Alan Ellis can help. Attorney, author, and self-publicist, Ellis is the creator of a new legal niche—one that places him in the time-honored American tradition of the fast-talking salesman.
Days after the United States elected the first president of color, seven high school boys set out looking for Hispanics to beat up in a Long Island village. Spotting Marcelo, they surrounded him, punching and kicking, then stabbed him.
This story of two robots in love asserts that sacrifice is what makes love worthwhile.
Each of the women in these short stories are realistically drawn.
Guest nonfiction editor Brenda Wineapple brings to Guernica three essays that speak loudly and luminously to one another across generations.
The soldier had been trained in the language of the people he disappeared. This language was a language of things and their ghosts.
How beautiful our daughter is in her white Tethering dress, dancing with her younger cousins across the decorated length of our yard
With 15 million men and women unemployed, our writer argues that the first step to fixing the job crisis is reimagining what Americans should be working on in the first place
The gender-theorist-turned-philosopher-of-nonviolence discusses the choices that make people expendable, the violent foundation of nonviolent activism, and the role grief can play in setting a new course.
The greatest living filmmaker you’ve never heard of.
There was a time when illegal abortion was the only option for a woman with an unwanted pregnancy.
When the author gets bedbugs, she finds the toll on her body pales when compared with the toll on her beloved books and further, the threat the bugs pose to the bohemian spirit of New York City.
That the conversations about The Pride have mostly been concerning the confusion about the story’s setting is a shame, as the ideas that drive the play are important.
Guest edited by Shane Lavalette, these photographs are driven by the question, “What can a photograph be?”
The decomposing squirrel in the yard, / a plump sack. That night / I bled for hours, like a dumb animal.
After the death of his mother, a down-and-out writer realizes he needs a place, the kind you can’t buy, sell, deed, lease, or fence.
Ricardo never knew what to say to Javier Castillo. Can you blame him? I wouldn’t know what to say to a man who could disappear.
While amateur Iraq war footage abounds, Nick Sautin asks if the trend represents our “right to view,” or is it porn made from leftovers of a world filming its self-destruction?
Fourteen years after the end of Sarajevo’s besiegement during the Bosnian War, one writer finds a country uniquely capable of embracing the past while moving into the future.
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck’s combined sound and energy is a complete success.
Sochienne called her a fat bourgeois, a dilettante dancing while Nigeria was failing, as though she could somehow solve the country’s problems by depriving herself of a manicure.
His mother was about to say something, but all she could murmur was zalzala. Earthquake.
These paintings focus on the American myth of the seeker, traveling alone through untouched landscapes in search of a revelatory experience of the divine.
Women make up 80% of the fiction reading audience in this country. So why, guest fiction editor Claire Messud asks, are women authors so frequently left off the best-of lists, and left out of prestigious book prizes?
For Orthodox Jews, matchmaking and dating are more confusing than ever. Is secularism to blame? Feminism? Or is it part of a greater crisis?
The writers’ wise observations make this collection worthwhile.
Neither book requires its readers to be a fan of the star—and that’s why they are great reads.
The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.
There are amazing writers who can make converts of even the most staunch opponents of verse.
In asking Chomsky what I thought was a provocative challenge question, I’m afraid I gave Cohen too much credit.
I wandered around, and thumbed through the remaindered bestsellers and out-of-date guidebooks, when I came across The Magical Key. This particular edition had the illustrations by Maurice Sendak and its afterword was by W.H. Auden. What was this book?
The claymation videos “Hobo Clown” and “Forest” capture otherworld buffoonery and the sublime, with music by the rock band Grizzly Bear.
How Dubai’s legal catch-22 transforms workers from around the world into de facto slave laborers without rights, days off, or pay.
Just as the 1800s were ripe for the abolition of slavery, this century will bring forces to bear on freeing women from violence, slavery, and oppression.
While the aerospace community waits for February when President Obama will announce the 2011 budget, effectively setting NASA’s direction for the near future, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin agitates for a manned mission to Mars.
Where do architectural wonders, coat hanger abortions, virtual slave labor, and a modern underground railroad meet?
The Arab is so stunned, he doesn’t move. Just stands there with his certificate and his rusty key. Not breathing.
To the country dug into our lives like a grave, / to the country etherized, and killed, / a sun rises from our paralyzed history / into our millennial sleep.
A week removed from the Student Day protests, some media still claim the pace of change in Iran indicates weakness on the part of student protesters. But could it be a sign of political maturity?
Reading Erickson is like careering through space in a stunt car—the kind that jumps ramps through rings of fire.
The MEND rebels of the Niger Delta are on a charm offensive, hosting press on fact-finding missions. Are they legitimate freedom fighters or environmental profiteers?
This is what you will not understand, / I tell this jelly, this fat crybaby girl.
Is this exuberant college town, named for defying the trends of the Great Depression, a clue into American violence, grief, and longing?
When art sets out to deceive us, do we collude with just our eyes? The author visits an exhibit of trompe l’œil in Florence.
“Since graduating school, no book has impressed me as much as Augie March.”
The controversial critic of U.S. foreign policy discusses his forthcoming book, the hypocrisy of neoliberalism, where he feels hopeful about democracy despite U.S. terrorism, and his friendship—okay, passing acquaintance—with Hugo Chavez and other “pink tide” presidents.
In Java, Indonesia’s traditionally relaxed Islam has lost ground to an assertive new orthodoxy.
Read him for the same reason you might drink whiskey neat: to brace yourself and awaken your senses.
Twenty years later, a Georgian writer recalls the pursuit of money in the years immediately after the Iron Curtain came down.
You’ve learned it 34 years too late and it wrestles / with the story of Cyrus, /
the first man you’ve known with a woman’s / curved breast.
Twenty years later, a Georgian writer recalls the pursuit of money in the years immediately after the Iron Curtain came down.
Roberto Bolaño is being sold in the U.S. as the next Gabriel García Márquez, a darker, wilder, decidedly un-magical paragon of Latin American literature. But his former friend and fellow novelist isn’t buying it.
Laura van den Berg’s writing is spare and elliptical. Large topics are broached, but quietly and the stories stay with you.
This book is a weapon. It will teach you how to think.
Public health care threw every conceivable obstacle at one pregnant American in Italy—bureaucracy, long waits, condescending doctors—yet she still favors the public option. Here’s her story.
They have seen my house burn. They have shown themselves to be that which they hate, that which they want to chase away out of the village.
As Afghanistan erupts with redoubled violence, the author recounts the unbroken line of soldiers who have refused to serve (or repented their service) in every American war since the War of 1812.
On the gradual extinction of print journals.
Back in his native Sudan for the first time in years, the author observes the capital’s newfound oil wealth and argues that focusing narrowly on Darfur while ignoring the secessionist South could spell big trouble for all of Sudan.
The genre- and language-blending Mexican-American singer discusses “Indian-ness,” making music in the land of cultural chameleons, and says she may never be hip in the U.S. But her songs might be the most eloquent response yet to the likes of Joe “You Lie” Wilson.
It was she who befriended Pieter. The things they did were not good things, not always. Once, they cut off a horse’s hoof for no reason at all, and left it on the steps of the church.
Based on her new book, A Paradise Built in Hell, in which she offers a radically different vision of how people react to disasters -- they don't panic, they don't scream, they don't look helplessly to governments for aid, they begin to organize themselves -- Solnit offers us September 11th, 2001 through fresh eyes in a new moment in our history.
This month in Berlin, June Glasson exhibits her series The Foulest of Shapes, ink-and-wash drawings of women engaged in violence and revelry that pose complex questions about what it means to be a feminist artist today.
After that, the sound of hammers and crows / through the open window, then somebody needs to // cut down that goddamn tree.
Since Pieter Emily had been seen, a rash of trouble had begun. The farmers on farms closest to the low road had found animals dead, their throats cut.
Four years after Hurricane Katrina, a New Orleanian before and after the storm has guest edited our September issue culling art of all genres with the hopes of identifying how New Orleans is healing.
Everything floats down to this place, the very end of Bayou St. John where Delia sits, her feet dangling just above the tepid water.
Set in Sri Lanka, A Disobedient Girl is heart-wrenching and jubilant.
What’s revealing about Obama’s art selections for the White House has nothing to do with gender or race. It’s more abstract than that.
We meet to congratulate ourselves but we also meet to purge ourselves. We meet to share things we cannot share with you. Smart things but also customs. Like the metaphorical value of sleeping in a nightcap to keep the genius in.
Detroit, the country’s most depressed metropolis, has zero produce-carrying grocery chains. It also has open land, fertile soil, ample water, and the ingredients to reinvent itself from Motor City to urban farm.
Available again, is Robert Mitchum’s performance in The Friends of Eddie Coyle as an aging gunrunner forced by circumstances to snitch on his criminal “friends. ”
How is it that miniature works can express so much? For the author, an exhibition of tiny objects conjures thoughts of philosopher Gaston Bachelard, homes designed for low-emission living, dinner in a shed, and the infinite.
E.C. Osondu's story in Guernica, Waiting, won the so-called African Booker—the Caine Prize for African Writing.
his lips in the dark dog-warm against / the flat of my foot / became pain became not became flame
The monkey shrieks and runs across the table, scattering purchase orders. They have just finished the “Fancy Furry Friends” trade show in Las Vegas where the monkey dutifully twirled a tiny baton in a beguiling azure tulle and sequined gown.
By bridging aspects of intelligent design with evolution in a new approach they call “possibilism,” the authors probably haven’t solved the American culture wars. But they might have.
While building a tree house with his father, the author at twelve begins to understand the politics at play in the backyards of his suburban neighborhood.
Pakistan’s dynasty-bashing heir apparent, Fatima Bhutto, discusses how Obama and corruption legitimize the Taliban, her work to include women in Pakistani politics, and why she will never run for office (it’s not why you think).
Fighting cancer, the author escapes to India to learn Hindi and throw her life “in the air for a passion.”
Back in the Mississippi Delta for the first time in four years, a teacher comes face to face with what he left behind.
Today, on the steps of one of our nations greatest buildings, in the company of some of our most powerful and respected leaders, Darfuri voices were heard.
Citing French literary gods like Proust and Molière, the French prankster extraordinaire, in a new translation by Suzanne Menghraj, asks, “Isn’t it high time we started thinking about all the crap good writers make?”
Could have gone west. Could have packed your things, / who cares that you weren’t old enough to drive.
One year after the earthquake that devastated central China, the author contemplates the connections between the quake, Chinese history, and his father’s death.
Is modern conservation linked with ethnic cleansing? In an excerpt from his new book, the investigative historian explores the concepts of wilderness and nature, and argues that the removal of aboriginal people from their homeland to create wilderness is a charade.
Why every nation needs a poet—an essay on Israel, Palestine, and the United States, from Amman, Jordan.
Catching fleeting moments that might normally pass by unremarked in the great whirl of everyday life is the writer’s mission, and one that is especially enlivened by the tabula rasa of a foreign country.
During the Cold War, the son of an American journalist, soon to be jailed, spends his Moscow nights drinking, smoking, and black-marketing with Russian metalheads.
As conflict once again threatens the heart of Palestine and Israel, our writer takes a look back to one group who, after great struggle, found a way to ford rivers of blood and tear down the walls of their own minds.
I find him sitting on a plastic lounge chair by the hotel pool. I give a little wave and he stands. We kiss on the cheek. He tells me I’m taller than he remembers.
An American in Germany sifts through the cultural signposts, in pursuit of what it means to belong to a particular nation.
From a remote village, the author considers lovers’ vows, and the twittering from the trees.
What a pirate festival, and dancing alone to Calypso, can teach us about the here and now.
What if the September 11th attacks had coincided with the ravage of Hurricane Katrina? In India during November’s monsoon and the Mumbai attacks, our writer weighs the connections between weather and terrorism.
Although investigations into the hyper-violent 22-day war should be done, Israel, along with all states and non-state belligerents, must go further and review the weapons they use and how they use them.
The daughter of a Jewish-American peace negotiator narrates the drama of her father's surprisingly--and perhaps inappropriately--close relationship with Yasir Arafat.
The daughter of a Nazi soldier recalls the spark and fizzle of her tenth New Year's Eve.
For Brazilian-born artist and modern-day trickster Vik Muniz, subverting his own images is all part of the game.
I watch the color as she moves, carrying all of him in her form as if she knows. Stopping before a photograph, she meets my brother for the first time. Propped, he is supported by a slim frame of wood, reduced to a single moment in a four inch by six inch frame, laughing.
I would like to give birth to a new holiday tradition. Forget the Happy Hanukkah cards. How about a thank you note?
In the Sri Lankan city of Batticaloa, an American peace worker watches one woman bravely face the worst the world can offer.
The inhabitants of the Marshall Islands have endured waves of immigration, exploitation, and America’s nuclear testing. Now under threat from rising sea levels, their storytelling culture offers us a cautionary tale.
My first instinct is to step aside and let the work speak for itself. That is almost always my first instinct, but in this case, it is certainly the best instinct, since the two works in question are both powerful and compelling.
Isn’t it funny how good numb can feel? Is that / the experience? Or is it waking up after—lucid but no longer asking (or caring) /where it throbs—or when—or why—or because of whom.
Until his conscience overcame him, David Brock was conservatives' go-to hitman. The inside story of the media watchdog who has Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage--even Stephen Colbert--fuming mad.
I want to offer one-sentence credos written by each of the contributors, and it will show you in shorthand what drives them, what they believe is possible in writing, and how they distill their practice (especially when they know that their sentences will be published without attribution, which is how I got them to cough up these mottos in the first place).
Church was bunk. Scarves were bunk. The cold was bunk. Robert Fancer’s grandfather, the man he was wheeling back from afternoon service in a crappy chair, was massively bunk.
We are all of us spectators—and this must be asserted in the face of the many naive traditions insisting that a portion of us are of a lesser sort, and can or should not truly bear witness to Agony and all that precedes it.
Cellphoned to their continents, Pilgrims / from whatever persecution, kill those turkeys in / want, want, want, and the landing gear drops.
in superficial ways—the size of the chimney or placement of the porch—or in meeker assertions, a mailbox that looked like a reindeer, a soggy doll fastened to a swing. Evidence of thoughtless, pleasureless lives.
She was walking with the short man. Though only yesterday she had been with the tall man. Or she was walking behind the short man, down the street, wondering did she really want to do this and if not why would she be doing it?
My friends in the camp are known by the inscriptions written on their t-shirts. Acapulco wears a t-shirt with the inscription, Acapulco. Sexy’s t-shirt has the inscription Tell Me I’m Sexy. Paris’s t-shirt says See Paris And Die.
In Leroy’s account, a woman named Amanda, who wears a name tag that identifies her as a sales associate at the Museum of Olivia, explains that entering the town requires the payment of an admission fee because, “the Town of Olivia is the Museum of Olivia.”
To enter the state of being a tree it’s necessary / to begin with a gecko’s amphibian torpor /
at three in the afternoon in the month of August.
Once the target of the U.S. war on drugs, Bolivian coca is being repackaged by activist farmers in hopes of giving the crop a legal life in this destitute nation.
Grandmother was sprawled upon the couch in a heap of black crinoline; her shockingly white legs were raised in the air. Mr. Sparrow supported himself in a very precarious position and did not look the least bit comfortable but was busy grinding his privates into Grandmother’s, much like a mortar and pestle.
The congresswoman and author on the impact of Hillary's candidacy and the utter shortsightedness of voting for McCain; plus, the next big goal for women, and the importance of supportive fathers.
Seth Fischer was like most of his friends, protesting a faraway war being fought by people, on both sides, he didn't know. Lance Corporal Eric Vargas changed all that.
They met along the East River, beneath the Manhattan Bridge, on the esplanade.
Here at the continent’s end, fortifications / linger for the end of the world. They greet // each California morning, these barracks in the fog. / Below, the lagoon is gunmetal, or mercury poured.
I lived my first three years in Korea, in my grandfather’s house in Seoul, before we moved to Truk, Hawaii, Guam, then Maine.
She was limp and sweaty but I snuggled into the comfortable softness of her. They had cut her open, and she was whole. She looked very tired and sick; on her gown, blood bloomed like a slow flower.
The Supreme Court ruled last week that prisoners in Guantánamo Bay have a right to challenge their imprisonment in a civilian court. Having been kidnapped, tortured, raped, and driven to try suicide, prisoner Jumah al-Dossary was one of the lucky ones.
Al Jazeera English broadcasts in nearly 120 million homes worldwide, but only a handful are in the United States. Here is why.
The punk rock icon discusses debating the soldiers in Iraq, Sean Hannity's lack of courage, and the incalculable influence of Chuck D
It’s true I slept with Abe Lincoln. / I now know everything there is to know about this country. / Believe me, I carry a tapeworm for you the size of Kentucky.
While many governments now involve indigenous groups in environmental conservation, India is on the verge of creating what might become the largest mass eviction for conservation ever. Groups like India's Adivasis have come to be called “conservation refugees.” Mark Dowie tells their story.
A survey by Baghdad's best pollster asked Iraqis which "suits you well": Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslim, or Just Muslim. The biggest category chose the last option. Then came the US occupation.
When writer Akshay Ahuja transported a guitar to India, little did he know he was being led down a rabbit hole to a vibrant subculture by a group that styled itself the Cremated Souls
In this extract from his memoir, Escape from Saddam, Lewis Alsamari recalls some of the gruesome rumors and boyhood experiences that led to his dangerous escape from one of the world's most feared regimes.
Five years after the invasion of Iraq, Jonathan Steele shows the surge's inherent contradictions. To increase security is to diminish sovereignty, which fuels resistance. There is one solution: Admit defeat, then leave.
The sergeant dealt him a series of rapid-fire slashes across the face with his whip, and then dragged him to the edge of the flooded pit.
The young man was having a cigarette on the street corner, feeling just about ready to get on with his day, when a man with a Clark Gable moustache and a shaved head leaned out his second story window and called down, “Hey you."
Of course, along with just about everything else in my life, everything work-related stopped, was canceled, postponed.
Guatemalan-born writer and translator David Unger recounts the chance encounter that led to the job of a lifetime: ghostwriter for Gabriel García Márquez
Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survives /
alright. It aches like an open book. It makes it difficult to live.
What does it take to drive the population of a county crazy? Apparently, just 3 liters of gas a day. Salar Abdoh navigates his way through the meaning behind Iran's fuel rationing.
Join the club… or the Church of the Subgenius that is. A fringe religion that might not be as far out as it seems.
By the time the star-spangled cover reached Sunday breakfast tables, NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia were underway; the U.S.-led bombing campaign would last for seventy-eight straight days.
“Just lie there,” he would say. “Pretend your hands are tied to the bed frame. Pretend you can’t move them.”
Somewhere there is a perfect architecture / where light, form, shadow, space all move / to form a language beyond architecture, / where to dream of the wrong architecture / is to dream of dying.
Its Celtic Tiger economy has propelled Ireland from one of Europe’s poorest countries to one of its richest. But money doesn’t make the country. Why the Irish cultural identity must be re-imagined now.
Liam Rector’s efforts to revitalize poetry were two-fold: both writing and encouraging great verse. Not every artist wants to work on the apparatus of his art—the less glamorous side of sitting on committees, founding programs, judging contests—but Liam seemed comfortable in the role of officiator.
What Nigerian writer, Okey Ndibe, sees when he recalls the Biafran War.
Writer Salar Abdoh considers the difference between “art” and “evidence” in modern day Iran—and discovers that when those roles overlap, images disappear.
A guy in a suit, I don't know him, walks by my cubicle holding one of the paper plates, his mouth full, chewing his last bite, folds the plate around his napkin and fork and cake crumbs, leans into my cubicle, reaches around a corner and stuffs the plate in my garbage can. No look, no excuse me, no nothing.
When the zebaleen, the garbage people of Cairo, were stripped of their responsibilities by the government, nothing but education could save them.
I'll give you a roll of barbwire / A vine for this modern epoch / Climbing all over our souls / That's our love, take it, don't ask
The hero arrives in an armada, years after you begin dreaming of him in black and white. // Armies stamp through your sleep, dole out chocolate, dried milk with a chalkiness
you long for.
What we heard wasn't wisdom. Friends made suggestions, dumb things. I didn’t hear them or listen. I snoozed on painkillers, lay on linen.
when dusk says hand it over / what am I supposed to hand over // in printing you have to choose / between portrait or landscape
Abdoh contemplates the codes of modesty in Iran, and finds himself caught between a New York yoga class and the Caspian Sea.
Yes, that’s right, maybe I’ve run out of / patience, we have certainly run out of cigarettes / and the later, as Cioran used to say // hold more fire than the Gospels in our blessed country.
I will try to live on earth without you. / I will try to live on earth without you. // I will become any object, / I don’t care what— // I will be this speeding train.
I am delighted to present the works of four writers whose originality, intelligence and emotional acuity I deeply admire.
I HEAR THE AXE HAS FLOWERED, / I hear the place can't be named
"We’re not firefighters,” Francis said.
The skinny man laughed. “Did you hear that guys? They say they’re not firefighters,” he called to the other five men who hadn’t gotten up to greet us but were still sitting down, smoking and conversing. “Slater, you a firefighter?”
The man who apparently went by Slater smiled. “Hell no.”
Women are murdered in Guatemala so frequently that the phenomenon has been given a name: femicide. Despite worldwide calls for action, the problem seems only to be getting worse.
Once there were more than 75,000. Today less than 100 remain. What led to the end of the once thriving Egyptian Jewish community, and how are the few who are left preserving their culture?
“I don’t fuck much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future”—Patti Smith
Then you march, which means that you promenade toward the capitol, then around its back, ending up where you’d started in the first place.
Burma’s Kayan women brave indignity and exploitation to continue a centuries-old tradition: wrapping their necks in symbols of feminine beauty, otherworldly status, and matriarchal power.
Photojournalists can make a killing in galleries with war photos. Should they?
Much of that Presidential power comes from proper use of words: “We have nothing to fear but ____ (finish the sentence).” “The buck stops ____” “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this ___.”
Was dying to write something witty and engaging and perhaps even interesting to introduce these four stories.
It's time to stop the mindless praise of a mediocre man who blew a chance at greatness because he seemed to believe so strongly in civility and goodwill.
You never expect a zombie to lean over and bite you, so you don't really notice it before it's too late and the zombie apocalypse has begun. If you knew, you could easily outrun the slow moving ones. You could just walk a little faster and you’d be fine. The way they get you is that you don’t know that they are coming.
Having grown up with three languages, I have always found translation a handy way of getting at the limitations of language.
Will oil bring wealth or war to the people of Chad?
The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is a tremendous feminist success story. So you can imagine my disappointment when I found out the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) where VAWA lives) is going to be run by yet another wacky Bush appointee.
On the buying and selling of prescription records by major drug companies and pharmacy chains
Our love was probably less sexual than total, Californian in its appreciation of the other’s physical being, an annexation of identity.
Two doctors, married to each other. At first it was doctor and nurse skulking dark corridors in heat and finding empty gurneys, then doctor on doctor.
| I have been to New Orleans many times, but I had never been down for Mardi Gras. This year I went down to take the emotional temperature of the city, six months after the devastation of hurricane Katrina. I found, amid the piles of renovation rubble and vast stretches of empty homes, that this city which is so unique and so rich in culture and tradition has not lost its sense of self, and that the people who make New Orleans what it is have no intention of giving up. |
| Mardi Gras in New Orleans, six months after hurricane Katrina, and I find that the people of the city are asserting their spirit in the midst of their reconstruction efforts. |
| This year’s Mardi Gras was like a city-wide barbecue, an open-air party in what is essentially a disaster zone that is also everyone's home. Now, the party is over, and since I hadn’t been able to before, I take a ride out to see the hardest-hit areas of the city. |
How the drug industry cashes in on drugs of dubious benefit
What if it was your body that was the “battleground”…
Coyotes swarm these hills at night in great flurries of electric lantern-light.
The former deputy assistant attorney general on his new book, the Geneva Conventions and the legal case for torture
The five ways drug companies entangle physicians in conflicts of interest. Part 2 of a four-part investigation.
I must always write in a solitary space because I am a poet of impermanence, of continuous travels, of imprecise cartographies.
I tell myself I bought the painting as a souvenir, a memory in the French sense. But really it is my consolation for not finding out Amy’s name.
Is your doctor prescribing the drugs you need or the drugs a pharmaceutical rep needs to sell? Part 1 of a 4 part investigation.
What Cindy Sheehan and New Orleans mothers share: grief over the government's failures.
Two hurricanes, one of them human, had blown through American life; between them, they had linked the previously unconnected.
It wasn't him they were so worried about. It was the half dozen grenades still wrapped to his wetsuit.
My wife and I were kick-ass archeologists. Found all kinds of old, important shit out in the jungle, dealing with dangerous natives, applying for grants.
A British officer and African soldier show that the arrangements of history are subordinate to the call of friendship.
Bush's desire that Eastern Europeans support any adventure to which the U.S. attaches the 'freedom' label depends on a vision of Europe that's already outdated.
“You must find me very queer then, Madame Clavdia. I’m sorry if I disconcert you,” Tintin said, his voice low, his eyes downcast.
Cowering behind an almost idiotic silence, I avoided looking into his eyes, gripped by the same fear that must have gripped Odysseus as he ran from the singular gaze of the Cyclops.
Artists are more capable than theorists or pundits in representing the consciousness of the people, because the language of art is a language of immediacy, of spirit, and of the transporting analogy.
Her parents were naked, one on top of the other. Their eyes were closed, their faces contorted; they were breathing loudly and moaning. She watched them for a few moments, terrified; then she walked quietly back to her cot and covered her face with the pillow.
A blue glow / Streams out from my clothes. / Midwinter. / A clinking tambour made of ice. / I close my eyes. / Somewhere
You could look from one end to the other, but for me there was only Castro’s hand, it held me in a hypnotic grip.
It means looking at the part of nature we intend to turn toward our own ends and asking whether we can use it again and again and again—sustainably—without its being diminished in the process.
Never has an administration spent so much time creating, defining, or redefining terms, perhaps because no one (since George Orwell) has grasped the power and possibility that lay hidden in plain sight in the naming and renaming of words.
Tonight the lares have eaten their offerings. / The sweetbreads are gone, black kidneys / Infantine and nacred as mollusk-eggs. The smoke / Circles and begins to clear.
Are your recollections really recent or do they reflect a remote past? You feel as if time is not time on the clock, and an aura of unreality surrounds you.
To be more specific, we own a Wolof god of justice and an Ewe goddess of fertility,”
So I hear you’re going around saying you sold your soul to the devil . . .
Since it is very hot out at sea, sometimes someone comes down with a little fever.
Nothing like a deadly catastrophe to make journalists and nations look important. And nothing like the next news cycle to shake all that importance loose again.
Will someone write a book about America’s historic rejection of third party candidates at the beginning of the millennium? And if they do, will anybody read it?
Harvests of numbers and hackneyed conjectures are staples of American discourse.
If there is any one lesson to be learned from this election, social theorists are going to have to revise slightly what one means by not only the “values voter”, but the “religious right” in this country.
We sleep in sleeping bags on the beach, so in order to get close to you I have to slip out of mine first, then slip you out of yours.
We went to a cafe I knew near the bookstore. I tried to please him by saying, they have excellent coffee here.
He smells me, / and I in turn smell a faint scent of tumeric, // or bijol, the colorant my mother used / in her paellas, or arroz con pollo dishes.
The Roberts Court—and Roberts himself—upholds a campaign finance rule.
In the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, and so many others, what can we learn from the violence in our past?
