Thawra’s Loom

What’s your story? It’s all in the telling.

The discovery of a massive coal basin in Mozambique has kicked up a frenzy of investment, but this steroidal economy comes with a cost.

The activist and author reflects on childhood memories and the traffic of India’s Pink City.

A portrait of Syria’s child-refugees in Antakya, Turkey.

Muriel Rukeyser’s lost novel and the recovery of work by women writers

On the origins of Zaytuna College, the United States’ first Muslim liberal arts institution, and the scholars and students who call it home.

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.

Among the rebels in war-torn Syria.

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.

Life in a Chinese artists’ colony through the eyes of the local taxi driver

Letters from a quarter century of correspondence between the acclaimed American poet and the Swedish Nobel Prize winner.

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 author, a self-titled “black feminist pornographer,” works to dismantle stereotypes one video at a time.

The training camp where Stasi once learned to catch secrets with sex is a now free-love commune. But even free love isn’t easy. Meet a radical community’s jealous lovers.

What blooms in Brazil’s coastal desert.

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.

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.

American courts recognize rights to refuse life-saving treatment. So why won’t the State of Connecticut let William Coleman die?

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?

From a speech at the Earth at Risk conference, Roy on the misuses of democracy and the revolutionary power of exclusion.

Notes on prison tourism.

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?

Returning to Spain, a journalist and critic maps responses to the economic crisis and its historical points of origin.

A new documentary reveals the beauty and horror of plastic waste

Guest fiction editor Roxane Gay introduces this issue’s erotica.

Reflections on a postcard from David Foster Wallace

The natural world reveals mirth, mystery, and what we mean by “home.”

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.

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.

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.

A White American goes to Cameroon in search of his past.

Aman Sethi consults a troubled storyteller about the terrifying urban legends proliferating among Delhi’s displaced urban poor.

My mother needs her loom, and my father wants a wood shop. What do Baby Boomers consider before they sign away their worldly wealth?

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

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.

Two potters keep an unusual art alive in South Carolina.

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.

Riches beckon from beneath Haiti’s hills, and mining companies are hoping to lock in huge tax breaks to get at them.

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.

Before Wounded Knee, Native tribes following an apocalyptic prophet created a new dance that would, they hoped, rid the world of white people.

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.

In an excerpt from his posthumous graphic memoir, Pekar contends with his identity and the Jewish state.