Articles

On Palestinian Cinema

Palestine is not a country; it’s not even autonomous. Palestine is only a “situation.“

Kamran Rastegar

The Pygmies Were Our Compass: On the growing import of tourist guidebooks

In the summer of 2004, the artist Dirk Herzog installed a makeshift travel agency in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood…

Tirdad Zolghadr

Redolent Delusions: Nasir al-Din Shah and the art of indifference

“In the spring of the year 18-, the Shah-in-Shah, the great exalted and holy monarch, the absolute ruler and overlord of all the lands of Persia, began to feel a sense of malaise of a kind he had never experienced before”…

Naghmeh Sohrabi

Khartoum’s Hotel Acropole: A smile and a tea

Bureaucracy you thought had died with the Soviet empire flourishes in the deserts of Sudan with a smile and tea…

Elizabeth Rubin

On Pirates, Statisticians and Cruise Ship Directors: A conversation with Keller Easterling

Why is it now snowing in Dubai? Why is The Love Boat so popular in North Korea?

Nader Vossoughian

Notes on Watching Syriana and Munich

Saw Syriana as part of a two-part Clooneyathon a friend and I curated, impromptu, when we agreed to forego braving “Bareback Mounthim” opening day because it was playing in Los Angeles only at the nightmare “Art Deco-inspired” Pacific Theaters fourteen-screen cineplex…

Bruce Hainley

Ethnographic Tales: Subjectivity = the new objectivity

In 2003, Shah Mohammed Rais traveled to the Frankfurt Book Fair to contest the objectivity of an account of his life…

Christopher Pinney

Going to Sea in a Sieve: Trade routes of the literary vernacular

The 1990s were not kind to Paul Bowles, the late American existentialist pre-Beat bohemian guru…

Curtis Brown

Never Forget to Remember: On disaster and tourism

For many tourists, traveling to New York City is a voyage inside the TV. It is a pilgrimage to the mise en scène of countless television series and films…

Ken Okiishi

Thoughts on Kidnapping: Don’t let me go

When Bidoun suggested I write an article on kidnapping as a form of travel, I assumed they were joking…

Serge Michel

Doing Business with the Business World: A company profile of Intercultural Consulting Inc

Today, OSEC is hosting a seminar, “Doing Business with the Arab World”…

Tirdad Zolghadr

Sacha Baron Cohen: Borat vs. Kazakhstan: In my country, there is problem

Lambasting the contradictions and exploiting the xenophobia of Americans is all well and good, but is it done at the expense of another culture?

Brian Ackley

Hotel Four Seasons Istanbul: Five star imprisonment

The nicest thing about the Four Seasons Istanbul is that the building once housed a jail, and the off-white pillars in the hallways still show graffiti etchings from the prisoners…

Faouzi Rouissi

Living Only Once: The Iranian road movie

From the early masterpieces, “the road” has often been used as a metaphor for the transformations that traditional narrative films rehearse in the characters of their protagonists.

Kamran Rastegar

Homo Sapiens Are What They Call Us: Eugene Hütz talks to Rootsman

Eugene Hütz is the leader of the gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello and a staple of New York’s underground music scene.

Eugene Hütz, Rootsman

Mehrnaz Afzali’s The Red Card: A Portrait of a Somehow Endearing Criminal

This soap operatic affair, which has captured the attention of millions, began more than three years ago…

Sohrab Mohebbi

Nuclear Capabilities Aside: The Trickle-Up Politics of Ahmadinejad

Ducking the election flyers thrust through my car window one evening, I found myself face to face with a shapely midriff.

Coco Ferguson

Le Corbusier’s Algerian Fantasy: Blocking the Casbah

Le Corbusier came to Algiers almost by chance. On the occasion of the centennial celebration of French rule in 1931, a new city plan was unveiled by Henri Prost and the French colonial government…

Brian Ackley

Medinet Nasr: Unresolved amnesia, self-imagining and the marginal center

Nasr (Victory) City, or Medinet Nasr, is one of Cairo’s earliest “satellite cities,” a government-sponsored urban development that originally covered 6,300 feddans (6,539 acres) of desert land along the airport road between Abbasiyya and Heliopolis.

Clare Davies

Super Center: Life in Tehran’s largest housing development

Ekbatan may be traumatic architecturally, but its test-tube urbanism proves to be functional within the context of Tehran.

Brian Ackley