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 ...
Tag: War
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Can Child Soldiers Be Saved?
Everybody loves stories about child soldiers, it seems, as long as redemption is involved. A memoir about Sierra Leone’s civil war, for example, is not exactly the feel-good stuff you’d expect to see ...
Virtual Roundtable on the Library of Korean Literature
In this virtual roundtable, edited and introduced by Seo Hee Im, Koreanists and scholars of world literature reflect on five writers recently published in the Library of Korean Literature series by ...
Streetwise in Weimar
Scholars of Weimar Germany have long wrestled with the fact that this period of unparalleled innovation in intellectual and cultural life was a time of economic and social crisis, brought to a close ...
The War in the Air
The staggered beginnings of Kate Atkinson’s remarkable new novel, A God in Ruins, take a lurching upward trajectory, moving from earth to sky. Its fleeting prelude offers a glimpse of a Royal Air ...