Berfrois

Port-au-Prince’s Territories

Port-au-Prince’s Territories

In effect the state is missing in action, as the people suffer overlapping crises...

Read More

“Does everybody live in north London?” Mary Kay-Wilmers asks herself…

“Does everybody live in north London?” Mary Kay-Wilmers asks herself…

Photograph by Kake Pugh From The Guardian: The magazine goes to press on Friday night and the staff are often there into the early hours. Until recently, they ordered in supper from a local Indian restaurant much favoured by Wilmers. But she went on holiday a few weeks ago...

Read More

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei on Albania

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei on Albania

A while back I found an online edition of Anouck Durant and Gilles De Rapper's monograph Ylli: Les couleurs de la dictature.

Read More

‘The right that makes us human is the right to love’

‘The right that makes us human is the right to love’

Varanasi, India. Photograph by Raghu Rai by Leila Seth My name is Leila Seth. I am eighty-three years old. I have been in a long and happy marriage of more than sixty years with my husband Premo, and am the mother of three children. The eldest, Vikram, is a...

Read More

Jerry Moore: Feverish Rivers

Jerry Moore: Feverish Rivers

I learned that Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff had been a Nazi when I was in a Santa Marta supermarket. I had just stepped into the Exito Hypermarket when someone shout “Jerry! Jerry!” and I turned to see the archaeologist, Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo.

Read More

Jerry Moore: Law of the Mother

Jerry Moore: Law of the Mother

Living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia, the Kogi believe that the cosmos is shaped like an egg, and they build temples that replicate this egg-shaped multi-leveled cosmos. Kogi temples are circular buildings with walls of upright posts and capped by a thatched conical roof....

Read More

Maidan

Maidan

Image of Kiev via @TheFunambulist From The New York Review of Books: The students were the first to protest against the regime of President Viktor Yanukovych on the Maidan, the central square in Kiev, last November. These were the Ukrainians with the most to lose, the young people who...

Read More

Jerry Moore: Cosmos Like an Egg

Jerry Moore: Cosmos Like an Egg

The Kogi survived despite brutal onslaughts of Spanish colonialism and Colombian nationalism. For more than five centuries, there were campaigns to enslave the Kogi and other indigenous peoples and annihilate their culture and religion.

Read More

‘A pair of tights will do’

‘A pair of tights will do’

Photograph by Meghan Rutherford From Guernica: At times, disobedience is not even deliberate—it is something that seems to happen to you, rather than something you choose. The youngest journalist ever prosecuted, Sami Menteş, was doing his job—interviewing leftist activists just after the Taksim resistance—and he ended up in prison,...

Read More

A Man, a Plan, a Book Van: Lisbon by Oliver Farry

A Man, a Plan, a Book Van: Lisbon by Oliver Farry

Francisco Antolin and Domingos Cruz, old schoolfriends in Lisbon, were having a drink once when a problem common to them came up in conversation. Namely, getting hold of copies of Portuguese novels in translation they had each recommended to foreign friends. Copies to actually hand to somebody or to...

Read More

Is the Arab Spring dead?

Is the Arab Spring dead?

Photograph by Globovisión by Andrea Teti and Gennaro Gervasio The ‘Arab Spring’ is dead. The uprisings that began in Tunisia in December 2010 and spread throughout most of the Arab world were a dream, a beautiful dream, but a dream that has crashed onto the hard rocks of reality....

Read More

Eric Schneider on Philadelphia’s unfortunate nickname

Eric Schneider on Philadelphia’s unfortunate nickname

Murder is nearly always understood as an individual event and the criminal justice system reinforces this notion: there is an artifact, a body, that needs accounting for, and the medical examiner measures, weighs, dissects and categorizes the body as to age, race, gender and cause of death. The police...

Read More

Remembering Mandela

Remembering Mandela

Dear revisionists, Mandela will never, ever be your minstrel. Over the next few days you will try so, so hard to make him something he was not, and you will fail. You will try to smooth him, to sandblast him, to take away his Malcolm X. You will try...

Read More

Remnants of a Residential Ruin

Remnants of a Residential Ruin

From a map of Epping Forest, c.1876 From 3:AM: The structure had called my attention on several occasions. On walks through the Snaresbrook suburb in which it sat I would often peer through the locked gates and contemplate its use and history. It was not, as one local account...

Read More

Parallel

Parallel

In 2009, a couple days after I arrived, when Khaled’s English and my Arabic were at their worst, we had dinner at an outdoor café. We were eating chicken schwarma and drinking a kind of yogurt, sitting on plastic chairs, and a wedding party drove by with horns honking.

Read More