July 2009
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.

July 2009
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.

June 2009
Fighting cancer, the author escapes to India to learn Hindi and throw her life “in the air for a passion.”

June 2009
Back in the Mississippi Delta for the first time in four years, a teacher comes face to face with what he left behind.

May 2009
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?”

May 2009
One year after the earthquake that devastated central China, the author contemplates the connections between the quake, Chinese history, and his father’s death.

May 2009
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.

April 2009
Why every nation needs a poet—an essay on Israel, Palestine, and the United States, from Amman, Jordan.

April 2009
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.

April 2009
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.

April 2009
In the heart of conflict-ridden Palestine and Israel, the writer finds one group who, after great struggle, found a way to ford rivers of blood and tear down the walls of their own minds.

April 2009
An American in Germany sifts through the cultural signposts, in pursuit of what it means to belong to a particular nation.

March 2009
From a remote village, the author considers lovers’ vows, and the twittering from the trees.

March 2009
What a pirate festival, and dancing alone to Calypso, can teach us about the here and now.

March 2009
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.

March 2009
Why the so-called nuclear renaissance ought to be aborted.

February 2009
The daughter of a Jewish-American peace negotiator narrates the drama of her father’s surprisingly—and perhaps inappropriately—close relationship with Yasir Arafat.

February 2009
Two daring acts of seeing in and around the wilds of New York City.

January 2009
The daughter of a Nazi soldier recalls the spark and fizzle of her tenth New Year’s Eve.

January 2009
For Brazilian-born artist and modern-day trickster Vik Muniz, subverting his own images is all part of the game.

December 2008
In the Sri Lankan city of Batticaloa, an American peace worker watches one woman bravely face the worst the world can offer.

December 2008
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.

December 2008
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.

November 2008
Quoting Baudelaire, an American passes in Granada.

October 2008
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.

September 2008
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.

August 2008
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.

June 2008
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.

May 2008
Al Jazeera English broadcasts in nearly 120 million homes worldwide, but only a handful are in the United States. Here is why.

April 2008
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.

April 2008
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.

April 2008
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

March 2008
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.

March 2008
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.

November 2007
Guatemalan-born writer and translator David Unger recounts the chance encounter that led to the job of a lifetime: ghostwriter for Gabriel García Márquez

November 2007
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.

November 2007
Join the club… or the Church of the Subgenius that is. A fringe religion that might not be as far out as it seems.

October 2007
Norman Solomon has made a career out of challenging media to tell the truth. In an exclusive excerpt from his new book, he takes on Colin Powell, Thomas Friedman, Judith Miller, Bill Clinton and news reporters everywhere in a series of interrelated vignettes.

September 2007
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.

August 2007
What Nigerian writer, Okey Ndibe, sees when he recalls the Biafran War.

August 2007
Writer Salar Abdoh considers the difference between “art” and “evidence” in modern day Iran—and discovers that when those roles overlap, images disappear.

August 2007
When the zebaleen, the garbage people of Cairo, were stripped of their responsibilities by the government, nothing but education could save them.

June 2007
Abdoh contemplates the codes of modesty in Iran, and finds himself caught between a New York yoga class and the Caspian Sea.

March 2007
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.

November 2006
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?

September 2006
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.

August 2006
Photojournalists can make a killing in galleries with war photos. Should they?

August 2006
The Lebanon I enjoyed vanished two days after I left.

July 2006
Having grown up with three languages, I have always found translation a handy way of getting at the limitations of language.

July 2006
Will oil bring wealth or war to the people of Chad?

May 2006
The Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas Zúniga continues to push back

April 2006
On the buying and selling of prescription records by major drug companies and pharmacy chains

February 2006
How the drug industry cashes in on drugs of dubious benefit

February 2006
What if it was your body that was the “battleground”…

December 2005
The five ways drug companies entangle physicians in conflicts of interest. Part 2 of a four-part investigation.

November 2005
I must always write in a solitary space because I am a poet of impermanence, of continuous travels, of imprecise cartographies.

November 2005
Is your doctor prescribing the drugs you need or the drugs a pharmaceutical rep needs to sell? Part 1 of a 4 part investigation.

September 2005
What Cindy Sheehan and New Orleans mothers share: grief over the government's failures.

September 2005
Two hurricanes, one of them human, had blown through American life; between them, they had linked the previously unconnected.

August 2005
A British officer and African soldier show that the arrangements of history are subordinate to the call of friendship.

June 2005
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.

May 2005
Just the way it did in the industrialized world, environmentalism can probably make inroads in Brazil fastest as a fashion thing.

May 2005
This has nothing to do with the current orange alert; in fact, it has nothing to do with terrorist threats or any sort of threat at all. This is the City of New York’s response to a bicycle ride called “Critical Mass.”

May 2005
After a 13-year break, the U.S. is trying to improve relations with the Indonesian military. It is letting go of its concern about Indonesia’s human rights record that led Congress to curb military ties in 1992 and cut off Indonesia’s eligibility to buy certain kinds of lethal military equipment.

May 2005
President James Monroe christened Liberia ''a little America, destined to shine gem-like in the heart of darkest Africa.'' If Monroe's language is anachronistic, his optimism is not; what we have spawned, we can help renew.

May 2005
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.

May 2005
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.

April 2005
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.

January 2005
A Brazilian taxi driver's take on George W. Bush.

January 2005
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.

January 2005
Catholics and the Quest for the Presidency

October 2004
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?

October 2004
An Imposter checks in from the Czech Republic

October 2004
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.

October 2004
The author explores and explodes Guernica by Pablo Picasso.