The 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris—along with the brutal activities of ISIS—have spurred a resurgence of concern about Islam in Western media. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof fretted ...
Tag: Middle East
Laughing with ISIS in Nablus
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. An American walks into a shawarma shop in Nablus. The man behind the counter, renowned ...
Comic Craft
Once upon a time—well, in 2007—a young hero—that is to say, a Swiss-American corporate attorney—traveled to a faraway land—okay, Dubai—to seek his fortune. Such is the silhouette of The Dog, the ...
Can Drones Have Ethics?
In this interview, Claire Richard and media studies professor Peter Asaro discuss the history of drone warfare and the troubling proliferation of new technologies that can surveil and kill from a ...
For the Love of Israel
In 1963, after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt exchanged a series of tense letters. Scholem, a renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism and himself a critic of ...
Wonders of Destruction in Arabic Fiction
Historians of war and society would like to believe that military conflicts have fixed beginnings and ends. Conventional depictions of the Lebanese civil war are no exception and typically confine ...
To Lose Everything (To War)
“What is it like to lose everything?” the young protagonist of Stephen Dau’s first novel, The Book of Jonas, is asked again and again by those hoping to fathom his experience of losing his entire ...
War Stories
Today anyone with a computer or smart phone can access videos of armed conflicts from around the world. Battles that would once have been shared days, years, or even generations after the fact, via ...
Hollowgram
Make a left at the corner, head down the road about six miles, make a couple of quick rights, and you’re there: the plant of Thomson-Shore, printer of Dave Eggers’s new novel, A Hologram for the King ...
From Montana to Cairo, with Love
Pauls Toutonghi’s energetic second novel, Evel Knievel Days, tells the story of Khosi Saqr, a museum guide at the Copper King Mansion in Butte and “western Montana’s most famous half-Egyptian shut-in ...