A Line in the Sand

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.

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 themes preoccupy these five Arab-American writers? Body image, war, sex, and pizza. Arab-American literature is American literature, says our guest editor Randa Jarrar.

Will witch hunts for deserters and its initial refusal to arrest Mubarak lead Egypt’s military down a blind alley of violence and tyranny?

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.

After relocating her family to Brazil, a young mother learns the limits of the landscape.

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.

Each year at Disney World, thousands of interns earn academic credit for flipping burgers or parking cars. Ross Perlin learns about vague assignments, long hours, and the meaning of the phrase “protein spill.”

Despite everything, Slavoj Žižek still believes the Idea of communism is the most appropriate for our end times of crises and monsters.

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.

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].

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.

Will recent advances in human tissue preservation change the way we think about bodies, death, God… and China?

Two filmmakers survey the damage from the financial collapse to the present.

A writer recollects.

It’s easy to be a cashier in a New York deli, right?

What is there to hate about a camel?

Guest editor Deb Olin Unferth offers insights into the art of the memoir and introduces the present and future stars of the genre.

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.

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.

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.

What does “ruin porn” tell us about the motor city?

Our author was in Afghanistan to report on women who set themselves on fire to protest their social status. Then it got personal.

A math professor prefers lager to hoppy suds.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Will protecting an endangered toad trump Tanzania’s need for energy and development?

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.

During 2009’s post-election protests in Tehran, one man is struck into a commitment to the cause.

As Gulf fishermen are forced to work for the oil company that destroyed their livelihoods, who will train Louisiana’s next generation to fish?

How New York’s worst day led to its greatest photography exhibit ever.

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.

Want to become a poet? Spend a summer roofing under the Florida sun.

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.

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.

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.

When he was young and looking for a little direction, our writer turned to the Navy. There, he found many more questions than answers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Vietnam she was a rich woman, but in the U.S. she toiled stocking convenience store shelves. Why did Thao decide to immigrate?

The esteemed historian and novelist on how there is only one path for the United States in Afghanistan: withdrawal.

Before BP destroyed habitats and livelihoods in the Gulf, Monsanto landed in India. A filmmaker on the time of the GM cotton suicides, and what was learned.

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.

In Maoist China, a political prisoner feels his way through a Kafkaesque tableau of rumors, betrayal, interrogation, and execution.

In the 1970s Israel needed friends, and South Africa needed weapons. From a new book, the story of their secret alliance.

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.

The night before a bike ride that would change his life irrevocably, Paul Guest imagined his heartbreaking fate.

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.

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.

Guest nonfiction editor Brenda Wineapple brings to Guernica three essays that speak loudly and luminously to one another across generations.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

How Dubai’s legal catch-22 transforms workers from around the world into de facto slave laborers without rights, days off, or pay.

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?

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?

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?

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.

In Java, Indonesia’s traditionally relaxed Islam has lost ground to an assertive new orthodoxy.

Twenty years later, a Georgian writer recalls the pursuit of money in the years immediately after the Iron Curtain came down.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Quoting Baudelaire, an American passes in Granada.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

September 25, 1995: Several dozen reporters and photographers are packed into the room, bright with TV lights. The mayor steps to the microphones with a formal welcome for Colin Powell, who strides to the podium. He looks very executive in a black pinstriped suit, a crisp pastel blue shirt, a tasteful burgundy tie. From the  Continue Reading »

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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?

The Lebanon I enjoyed vanished two days after I left.

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 Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas Zúniga continues to push back

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

How the drug industry cashes in on drugs of dubious benefit

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Brazilian taxi driver’s take on George W. Bush.

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.

Catholics and the Quest for the Presidency

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?

An Imposter checks in from the Czech Republic

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.

The author explores and explodes Guernica by Pablo Picasso.