Tag
War
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The Treachery of Machine Realism
“The bombed elementary school in Iran appears to have become a target thanks to satellite imaging. In this case, what the image represented — and to who — was a matter of life and death.”
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The Art of (Not Forgetting) War
Many of the images in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibit World War I and the Visual Arts depict the war in such violent detail that their authors …
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Even Broken History Is History
Last month the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, spoke movingly about the removal of Confederate monuments and “the cult of the lost cause” they celebrate. The “Free Southerners” in Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, which opens in 2074, are also a cult of the lost cause: …
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B-Sides: Gustav Hasford’s “The Short-Timers”
The most persistent source of anguish in war stories may be the inability to tell them: the sense of a vast experiential and moral distance between the battlefield …
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Hawarden: A Castle and Its Dogs
Hawarden, pronounced “Harden,” sits on the edge of Wales. Walk along the River Dee for an hour and you’ll cross into England. This is borderland …
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More Orwell
No political event in memory has been as shocking and bewildering as Donald Trump’s election. It doesn’t seem to belong to our history, the history we had and thought we would go on having. How to …
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Tax the Rich?
If you’re wondering whether former Bernie enthusiasts and Trump supporters might find common ground in progressive tax policies that benefit the 99 percent, well, it’s doubtful that Taxing the Rich …
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The Yurt of Fiction
This summer, George Saunders wrote that Donald Trump had given him a gift. Saunders had been traveling across the country, attending Trump rallies …
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Syria’s Wartime Famine @100: “Martyrs of the Grass”
In the days leading up to the Muslim holiday of the Feast of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha) in October 2013, several Syrian clerics issued a fatwa …
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We Didn’t Have Politicians Up to the Task: A Conversation with Kanan Makiya
As the Iraqi Army and coalition forces, supported by US airstrikes, enter the third week of a campaign …
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Against Despair
Despair is everywhere, and for good reason. Huge numbers of refugees are fleeing warfare and violence, while unceasing terrorist attacks are feeding the right-wing populist surge all across Europe and North America. The world has gone awry, and no viable solution has emerged. Human rights, the great optimistic ideology of the 1990s, seems to be…
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The Afterlife of Agent Orange
“All wars are fought twice,” writes Viet Thanh Nguyen in Nothing Ever Dies, “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Even decades after the first war ends, the second war can be just as brutal. For now the victors would get to rule over more than just territory: they would get…
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Who Cares about American Power?
As the insane 2016 US presidential campaign enters its final weeks, we are with new urgency forced to question the role of American power in the world. In this charged moment, Noam Chomsky’s new book Who Rules the World? could not offer more essential reading; and the negative response to its publication could not be…
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Tales of the Interwar
Today, the once-provocative suggestion that we live in an age of interminable warfare has become a truism. The claim often takes the form of an observation about the post-9/11 syndrome that drives an endless War on Terror. Alternatively, it can become a description of our era as yet another chapter in the history of the…
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Stumbling Over a Violent Past
When Jennifer Teege was 38, she discovered a book in Hamburg’s central library that dramatically transformed her self-conception and her life: I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I? The book concerned the daughter of a prominent, infamous Nazi. That woman, Teege realized with shock, was her own mother, Monika. In that moment, Teege went…
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Comics versus Franquismo
In the late 1960s, dictator Francisco Franco slowly opened Spain to tourism while continuing to obliterate public memory of the retributions meted out after the Civil War (1936–9). I spent those years studying in Madrid, living for two semesters with a Spanish family. My professors were among the most distinguished of those who hadn’t sought…
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Burning Books to Stay Alive in Agualusa’s Angola
In 1975, amid the violence and chaos in Luanda on the eve of Angolan independence, Ludovica Fernandes Mano barricaded herself in her apartment. There she remained …
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Orange Alert
In our post-9/11 era, the phrase “national security” has become all too familiar. A simple Google search yields over 361,000,000 results, ranging from the National Security Council homepage to op-eds and extensive media coverage on the controversies surrounding NSA surveillance and, more recently, the inflammatory rhetoric of Republican presidential candidates. Since the Second World War,…
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The Rubble of Beirut
Lebanese author Elias Khoury’s latest novel to be translated into English, Broken Mirrors, is about identity and memory, destruction and displacement, exile and its internal ruptures. The book opens …
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Life After Wartime
Fisher House looks like any other suburban American home: a well-manicured lawn; a kitchen stocked with Girl Scout cookies, Maseca, and ice cream; a living room with a flat-screen TV and children’s toys; a barbeque out back. But for the wounded soldiers at Fisher House, ordinary life is painstakingly reconstructed but never really achieved. In…
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The Woolf Girl
Pity the small back of Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy who washed up on a Turkish beach, child victim of the refugee crisis. His photo went viral, sparked outrage; perhaps it will win an award. But as Lidia Yuknavitch asks in her terrifyingly prescient novel The Small Backs of Children, how can we look…
