LATEST ARTICLE Letter from Beirut: A Stubborn Indifference to War This city keeps you on your toes, as long as you hang on to them. When you walk across a one-way street, look both ways. No driver—on a motorcycle or in an SUV—hesitates to charge the wrong way up a road clearly signed for traffic to go in the opposite direction. When two cars meet head-on, the driver going the wrong way shouts abuse at the innocent one obeying the rules. Welcome to Beirut. This insouciant behavior reflects the...
28 days ago • 1 min read
LATEST ARTICLE 1970s Postcard showing the two bays of Zaytouni and Saint Georges Beirut, Now and Then On Wednesday , 8 April, Israel expanded its kill zone beyond what had been known as the ‘safe’ areas north of Beirut’s suburban south. I talked to a doctor at the American University Hospital who told me his emergency room was treating four hundred patients wounded in the bombing. Four had died. I passed the hospital, where families outside were waiting for the medical staff’s reports. By the...
6 months ago • 1 min read
LATEST ARTICLE Illustration by Joe Ciardiello Driving the Duke Finding family and a hero while serving as John Wayne’s chauffeur during the production of The Green Berets. In the fall of 1967, I went to work for Batjac Productions. It was a Monday-to-Friday job from around 3:30 in the afternoon—when I wasn’t in detention—until 6:30 or 7. The company had this 16-year-old Loyola High School senior photocopying scripts, answering fan mail, matching canceled checks to bank statements, running...
7 months ago • 1 min read
LATEST ARTICLE The Epic Story of the Little City That Cast Off Assad In Days of Love and Rage, Anand Gopal creates an indelible portrait of revolution and civil war in Syria. “Manbij. May God protect it,” the great traveler Ibn Jubayr of Valencia wrote in June 1184. “Its skies are bright, its aspect handsome, its breezes fragrant and perfumed, and while its day gives generous shade, its night is all enchantment.” These raptures eluded me when I visited the city 800 years later, in 1987, and...
8 months ago • 1 min read
LATEST ARTICLE A History of Modern Syria — the people at the heart of their own story Daniel Neep’s excellent account corrects the traditional narrative to show a nation surviving and resisting the powers that have vied to dominate it. Syria is as ancient, and as complex, as civilisation itself. Lying between antiquity’s great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia, it functioned as a bridge, sometimes a wall, between them. Rarely a conqueror, it adapted over millennia to invaders from all points...
9 months ago • 1 min read
LATEST ARTICLE Imperial graveyard The sufferings of Afghanistan, and of those who invade it Afghans may wonder why foreigners repeatedly invade their country before, invariably, scrambling for the exit. In 1842, the massacre of a retreating British army that had conquered the country four years earlier should have prevented Britain from trying – and failing – twice more, in 1878 and 1919. Next came the Soviet Union. Its triumphant conquest of 1979 ended ten years later in humiliation. The...
10 months ago • 1 min read
LATEST ARTICLE To Resist Injustice in Gaza and the Wider World Too many seek refuge in propaganda that what is being done to Palestinians is necessary. Egyptian-born Omar El Akkad had studied in the United States and been 10 years a journalist when, in the summer of 2021, he became an American citizen. Covering the War on Terror in Afghanistan and at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay exposed him to the “deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing they called “the free world.” Yet...
over 1 year ago • 1 min read
LATEST ARTICLE Liberation Daze Hope, fear, and uncertainty in postwar Syria. When I first visited Syria, on Easter Sunday 1973, Christian families were attending Mass and calling on one another with presents of sugar-coated almonds. To this twenty-two-year-old graduate student hitchhiking to Aqaba from Beirut, Syria was a mix of delightful chaos and state-imposed monotony. Christians, Druze, Alawis, and Jews were free to practice their faiths. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, alcohol was legal. Women...
over 1 year ago • 1 min read
LATEST ARTICLE Syria’s New Rulers Get a Makeover The country’s new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, has donned a suit, trimmed his beard, and dropped his nom de guerre. But Syrians are still afraid. The messages started appearing on my phone as soon as I left Syria in mid-January. At first, there were links to articles, and social media posts, about threats to Alawis and Christians. Then came friends’ accounts of scary incidents. One woman wrote that a police officer from the new government ordered...
over 1 year ago • 1 min read