Articles

Ahmed Shawki Museum

During my last visit to Calcutta, I visited the Tagore Palace. It was the closest I could get to the Bengali mystic and poet beyond communing with his poems and paintings.

Anna Boghiguian

Cyprien Gaillard

But while the American land artist’s work suggested a future in which nature would reclaim space from manmade structures, Dunepark is an archaeology of the proximate present, with its violence and its complicities, its checklist of things to forget.

Tom Morton

Mounira Al Solh

As viewers, we keep watching to see if some kind of fictional mask will slip to let in the revelatory light of the real — without being quite sure what such a moment would look like.

Charles Esche

The Aloha President: Barack Hussein Obama, Hawaiian Nationalist

If there is a racial fantasy worthy of consideration, it is not the oft-bruited suggestion that Obama is a Muslim or a Marxist or an Indonesian, but Stanley Dunham’s sly assertion that his grandson was the scion of Hawaiian royalty.

Gary Dauphin

The Queen

Bassem is a distant relative of Sabah, and, following in her platinum- blond footsteps, he is en route to achieving a comparable stardom.

Wael Lazkani

Flowers in the Desert

Maybe you’ve seen them in Times Square, in Union Square, or on 125th Street. Half a dozen black men dressed like characters out of an old Sinbad movie.

Emily Raboteau

House of Dodi

They appear to be about fifteen minutes away from slipping off to bed for a night of flashy, trashy sex — of posh lust and poshlust.

Tom Morton

Be the Flower in the Gun

On October 21, 1967, the French photographer Marc Riboud took a series of photographs of a Vietnam War protestor in front of the Pentagon.

Namwali Serpell, Maggie Miller

It Came From The Orient

Celastrus orbiculatus is a woody, deciduous flowering vine better known as “oriental bittersweet.”

Hanna Rose Shell

Velvet Impact

Shameena awoke, gasping. Her body shuddered in anticipation of a velvet impact that did not arrive.

Alessandra Shahbaz

Wolves That Do Not Eat Meat

In a grand reception room, little girls holding candles circle a throng of chanting adults; Kuwaiti men recline in sofas, dazed, smoking what appears to be hashish; and two German shepherds are caressed by the writhing, just-short-of-orgasmic hostess, Soraya.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Those Were The Days

I bought my first accordion in Ukraine.

Gregory Warner

Keep Eye On Ball

Throughout the latter half of the 1940s, the reigning champion of squash was a dapper Egyptian by the name of Mahmoud El Karim.

Latiffeh Ehteshami

Hobb Beiruti

To Arabs of the vaguely openminded persuasion, Beirut may hold the greatest promise for an alternative urban environment.

Youssef Rakha

A Life Full of Holes

It is 1961 in Tangier, and “a singularly quiet and ungregarious North African Moslem” decides to go to the cinema.

Sean Gullette

Avant Gardening

Yto Barrada’s Straight Project began in 1998 as a series of documentary photographs and other artworks made in and around the city of Tangier, Morocco.

Yto Barrada

Qaddafi’s Shades

When it comes to eyewear, the prudent despot opts for something chunky.

George Pendle

The Last Rose of Summer

The bougainvillea-draped, marble-tiled, baked-stucco compound where I gave my first blow job. It had been years since I’d spent dusk on a school night sprawled in the gravel and wet grass of one apartment’s back garden, testing out my gag reflex.

Sophia Al-Maria

Nairy Baghramian: Not being there

Baghramian herself is far more conspicuous than her work.

Jennifer Allen

Shady El Noshokaty’s Stammer

Opacity became a kind of medium in its own right, furthering fundamentally formal goals.

Clare Davies