In 2011, Muammar Gaddafi addressed world leaders with a prescient threat. If they intervened to end his shaky rule in Libya, he told a French journalist, they would be inviting “chaos, Bin Laden, armed factions . . . You will have immigration, thousands of people will invade Europe from Libya. And there will no longer be anyone to stop them.”
The Women’s March on Washington If the Republican National Convention—with its blood-chilling chants of “Lock her up!” reverberating off stadium ceilings, and vendors selling shirts reading “Trump That Bitch!” like hotcakes—was a revivalist megachurch concert from hell, Inauguration Day had the feeling of a quiet, solemn Easter Sunday. There were no chants, no celebratory posters. […]
In the last few years, even as Russia and the West have become bitterly opposed on one issue after another—Snowden, Ukraine, Crimea, Syria, the hacking allegations—there has been general agreement between them on at least one thing: the absolute centrality of Vladimir Putin. In Russia, he dominates the political stage and the airwaves, and a decade and a half after he first won the presidency, he still enjoys approval ratings that would be the envy of most elected leaders: After the annexation of Crimea, they spiked to over 80 percent, where they have remained ever since. In the West, he
I still remember reading the article that appeared in the New York Times in July 1981: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” I also remember thinking, What kind of sick joke is this? “Gay” cancer?
How quickly talk of war turns into talk of law! When a hospital is bombed in a military action, whether by the United States in Afghanistan, Russia in Syria, or Israel in Gaza, what typically draws outrage is the “war crime”—the violation of the laws of armed conflict—while the choice to wage war itself evades condemnation or analysis. Opposition to the Iraq War was commonly voiced as a matter of respect for international law. And now that Washington is helping a Saudi-led coalition bomb Yemen, one common apologia is that American targeting assistance saves lives by bringing air strikes into
I’m tired of Hillary partisans, too—the ones who devote more energy to verbally bludgeoning Clinton’s doubters on the left than to taking on her real enemies on the right. But even if, like me, you are critical of Clinton—of her corporate centrism, cronyism, elitism, and militarism—please consider voting for her anyway. She is probably going to win, but it’s no longer a lock. Trump has a narrow but plausible path: As of this writing, FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast gives him a 33 percent chance of winning. True, FiveThirtyEight foresees a better chance than all but Trump’s zealot legions, yet the data
The theme park at the center of Westworld—HBO’s new series, adapted from the 1973 sci-fi film written and directed by novelist Michael Crichton—is a simulation of a dirt-on-the brow, snake-in-the-boot nineteenth century frontier town where the only consequence of sin and murder is profit. The park’s hosts are sentient androids covered in impeccable artificial flesh, ignorant of the fact that the “new comers” to the park’s central town of Sweetwater are human guests who pay $40,000 per day for the chance to lay a saloon prostitute or shoot a man just to watch him die. But as expected from Crichton’s
Could there be a more propitious time to come out, as the title of Jason Brennan’s book announces, Against Democracy? From the Brexit vote to the Trump nomination, both liberal and conservative bien-pensants are grumbling that, if this is what the people decide, then maybe the people should not decide after all. If that is your mood, Brennan has catnip for you.
As the most ambitious political forces in the Middle East seem to grow ever more messianic and apocalyptic, who, or what, is the Arab of the future? The Syrian cartoonist Riad Sattouf leaves the question hanging at the end of his Maus-like graphic memoir. The blond little boy at the center of Sattouf’s tale is, like most of the political and cultural forces shaping his life’s story, profoundly unsettled. Readers see him become charmed, bewildered, and eventually endangered by his father’s myopic enthusiasm for the pseudosecular, quasi-socialist dictatorships of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and Hafez al-Assad’s Syria.
The customer is always right. In 1961, working to support the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, American military officials launched a new effort to understand their task. The organization then known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency—it has since added the word “Defense” to its name, becoming DARPA—decided to fund new programs in social-science research. The agency “needed studies performed that could answer questions that were confounding defense officials at the Pentagon,” Annie Jacobsen writes in her sprawling history of all things DARPA. “Who were these people, the Vietnamese? What made one Vietnamese peasant become a communist
The question of when the Lone Star State will “turn blue” has become as predictable a feature of the Texas campaign season as flags, bunting, Ted Nugent cameos, and generalized public indifference. It’s treated as a math problem. Political analysts come to us with calculations and charts, quantifying the growth of the Hispanic population and tossing around percentages—of eligible Hispanic voters, actual Hispanic voters, and actual Hispanic voters who will vote for Democrats—to predict just when the state might once again claim a Democratic majority. In Texas as elsewhere, we’ve become preoccupied with the numbers game: Everyone’s a strategist.
So what kind of book will emerge from the 2016 presidential campaign? For more than a year now, I’ve been saying a secular metaphysical cleric from deep in South America—Borges, say, or Julio Cortázar—should compose it. I recognize that they’re both “with the ancestors.” But would a Book of, or by, the Dead about Campaign 2016, complete with mix-and-match chapters and faux arcana, be any less opaque to real life than Donald J. Trump, a presidential candidate who exists in his own alternate universe, where feelings are facts and facts always lie?
The New York of The Night Of—an eight-episode HBO miniseries adapted by the novelist and screenwriter Richard Price from the British TV drama Criminal Justice—is gray, windswept, and blanketed in gloom. Watching the show’s first five episodes, four of which were directed by the show’s co-creator Steven Zaillian, we pass from a sparsely populated Upper West Side block to a dingy police booking station; from a well-furnished yet somehow oppressive house in Queens to a still more oppressive district court; from a support group for men battling skin conditions to a block in Rikers where obscure hierarchies are observed, coded
Circa August 1993, in a museum in the Netherlands, I had what Adam, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, skeptically calls “a profound experience of art,” something riveting and unselfconscious. (Adam has only experienced the absence of a profound experience of art, and he doesn’t believe that anyone else he knows has really been “changed” by a poem or song, either.) I was eight years old, intensely serious, receiving steady doses of cold medication and family Holocaust lore during my first trip out of the US. In a museum gift shop, I spied a print of a
The last thing most Americans wanted during Barack Obama’s second term was another war in the Middle East. But now we’re in one, and an inevitable and necessary raft of new books is emerging to explain to the public how and why this came to be. Patrick Cockburn’s The Rise of Islamic State is an important contribution to this topical genre, even though his account is deeply flawed in key respects. It is, at best, half the story, and readers will have to look elsewhere for a more comprehensive and balanced assessment.
After the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, online activists produced a jarring Internet meme, juxtaposing photos of the Islamic State’s atrocities with historical images of those of the Ku Klux Klan. However strained this connection may be, its visual impact is undeniably arresting. On the KKK half of the screen, one sees the familiar, terrifying image of hooded Klansmen, crosses hoisted as they marshal together and ride, every bit as inhuman as the balaclava-clad Islamists we’ve grown accustomed to fearing in our own age of ethno-religious and racial confrontation.
This year’s Republican National Convention, perhaps more than any previous one, brought incongruous segments of American society into close quarters. I didn’t have much in common with most of the people I met, but I did have one thing in common with the folks below: All of us were, in our own ways, outsiders.
The 1.7-square-mile restricted “event zone” demarcating this year’s Republican Convention in Cleveland, which includes two smaller, even more restricted “security zones” managed by the Secret Service, would have once seemed out of place in the American landscape. Ideals of open mobility and equal access are written into the land by the Jeffersonian grid that organizes not only the country’s farmland, but also many of its city blocks and streets, including those of Cleveland.
My wife and I had settled in for a quiet Friday night. With all the recent madness in Istanbul—the bombings, the scapegoating, the reprisals, the anxiety, the melancholic farewells with friends who decided they can’t take it anymore, and the consolatory exchanges with others who feel the same way but have no avenue of egress—we weren’t in the mood for socializing. So after putting our son to bed and eating a quick dinner, we snuggled up on the couch and chose a promisingly anodyne romantic comedy. Right around the time the leads were coming to the realization that they were,
Intrigue abounds in Missing Man, New York Times reporter Barry Meier’s account of the bizarre case of Robert Levinson, a sometime CIA contractor stranded in Iran without any official American recognition of his true whereabouts—or any pending hope of a Stateside return. But the convoluted espionage surrounding Levinson is puzzling on another level as well: It exposes the storied workings of global spycraft as run by a largely improvised, and oddly random, ensemble of bit players, striving to project some larger meaning onto what are, at bottom, all-too-mundane transactions. In this saga, figures like Robert Levinson are morally ambiguous and
