Articles

The Toughest Man in Cairo Versus The Zionist Vegetable

If he had a son, things would be easier. But Kamal has not been so lucky. He’s been trying to have a son for years. He tries every night, he told me.

Anand Balakrishnan

Twilight of the Iron Sheik: A wrestler in winter

Like Bon Jovi, Margaret Thatcher, and Don Johnson, the Iron Sheik was a pure product of the 1980s.

Negar Azimi

Driving Miss Deneuve: Je Veux Voir

She meets him for the first time in the morning and that night introduces him as a friend, smiling her legendarily blank yet overpowering smile at him.

Gary Dauphin

One Star is Enough to Make a Cosmos: Alighiero e Boetti and the One Hotel

It was at the One Hotel that the Italian conceived his most celebrated and emblematic artworks, the Mappa, a series of embroidered maps of the world.

Tom Francis

On Albert Lamorisse’s The Lovers’ Wind

The film was rejected by the Shah’s Ministry of Art and Culture. Lamorisse’s film was too soft-spoken, too folkloric; crucially, it showed none of Iran’s industrial triumphs.

Latiffeh Ehteshami, Lucy Raven

Revolution For Kids: Dar El Fata El Arabi, Recollected

What we wanted were rats, dogs that looked like the ones you see walking down the street, cats smoking cigarettes.

Hassan Khan, Mohieddin Ellabbad, Nawal Traboulsi

The Future Takes Forever: Becoming FM-2030

“If it is natural to die then the hell with nature. Why submit to its tyranny? We must rise above nature. We must refuse to die.”

Benjamin Tiven

White Wash

On American Independence Day, 2005, the German firm Kärcher, which styles itself the “world’s leading provider of cleaning systems,” began the three-week project to remove lichen, moss, and other organic stains that could cause “bio-corrosion” from the monumental faces of the American presidents on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.

Kärcher Photo

A Conversation with Eliana Benador

If you see a “political adviser” on Fox News suggesting that Israel hasn’t gone far enough in its attacks on Hizbullah, there’s a good possibility that the appearance has been engineered by Mrs. Benador.

George Pendle

A Conversation with Alaa Abd El Fattah

“Are the authorities right to fear bloggers?” Activism, blogging, and imprisonment in Egypt.

Alaa Abd El Fattah, Ahdaf Soueif

A Conversation with Elaine Scarry

Facing this figure of almost Dickensian benevolence, it can take a moment to sink in that she’s correcting you. Sometimes it takes more than a moment.

Curtis Brown

A Conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum

I’m ready to talk politics and poetry and everything else under the sun. I got splinters on my butt-cheeks from sitting so long on this bench. And then the splinters got infected. I was worried I’d have to amputate flesh gobbets.

Bruce Hainley

A Portrait of the Jihadist as a White Negro: Or, the Ballad of John Walker Lindh

What happened at Abu Ghraib was in essence political and racial, not sexual.

Gary Dauphin

Muslin Gaze: The enigmatic afterlives of Bryn Jones

Every “transgressive” band needed an outrage, and Muslimgauze’s album covers were neither more nor less meaningful than anyone else’s.

Jace Clayton

Ziad Antar: Goal!

No artist in Lebanon is creating video pieces as unfettered by context as Antar.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Shahryar Nashat’s Plaque (Slab): Plaque Beauty

Nashat’s original inspiration was the freeform conceptual legacy of Canadian musician and composer Glenn Gould (1932-1982).

Dominic Eichler

Saâdane Afif: Gleaming the white cube

Afif doesn’t employ participation as a megaphone through which to prate about wooly notions of democracy.

Tom Morton

Paths of Glory: At the wedding party

I danced at their wedding with extra abandon, having dodged the fastest bullet of my young, eligible life.

Sophia Al-Maria

The Road To Wellville: Holiday at the austerity spa

At 10am, the medical portion of the treatment begins with an enema. (At Jindal, nature never calls; it is summoned).

Achal Prabhala

In the Beginning There was Souffles: Reconsidering Morocco’s most radical literary quarterly

Its trademark cover, emblazoned with an intense black sun, radiated rebellion.

Issandr El Amrani