In December, 2018, a volunteer who teaches photography at a school for refugee children on the Greek island of Samos gave Kodak disposable cameras to her class. She told the students to photograph their daily lives. “When we developed the pictures, we were highly impressed,” Giulia Cicoli, one of the founders of the school, known […]
We may barely remember one another or our pacts of undying friendship, but, in those brief and heavily intoxicated moments, I swear we were infinite. Grand Banks, 2012 Finding common ground in our dislike of artist boyfriends, we agreed that we’d never again be collateral for someone else’s creative process. Also, that rompers were a […]
When Ana first met Ruby, a sergeant in the Salvadoran Army, in the late nineteen-eighties, she liked him so much that she didn’t want to consider what his job would mean for her own safety. At twenty, Ana was small and soft-spoken. She had two young daughters whose fathers were so absent that their names […]
Moscow law enforcement recently spent fifty-six hours torturing a man. Almost immediately, Moscow reporters mobilized to obtain and disseminate information about his arrest and detention, and, once they did, their audiences were able to observe the situation almost in real time. Journalists from the very few remaining independent Russian-language media outlets, and also those from […]
As divided as House Democrats might be about impeachment—around sixty members, a small but growing minority, are thought to support beginning proceedings now—the caucus is united in support of facilitating the House’s ongoing investigations of President Trump. On Tuesday, the House voted to allow individual committees to sue the Trump Administration without the approval of […]
Today, lobster is a high-priced, gastronomic status symbol. But as recently as the mid-nineteenth century it was thought barely edible, fit only to be consumed in times of dire need. And lobster is not the only food that has been successfully rebranded. In fact, many of our modern luxury foods were once considered anything but. […]
In his approach to the carrot-versus-stick equation that is central to statecraft, Donald Trump always opts for the stick. Apparently unaware of, or unconcerned with, the advantages offered by the canny use of public diplomacy, coercive tactics have become a main feature of his Presidency. On the international stage, Trump has used rhetorical bluster, unleashed […]
Is there a more beleaguered group in the world of pop music than songwriters? Behind the scenes, they generate the raw material that performers mine for personal glory. They create music that is passed from fickle pop star to fickle pop star. They wait for months, or years, to see if a performer will choose […]
In March, a member of the Russian senate asked the prosecutor general to look into the issue of yoga in pretrial detention. Yoga classes, organized on the recommendation of human-rights activists, had been offered to a limited number of inmates since September. But then Alexander Dvorkin, a man who is considered the country’s preëminent expert […]
On June 5th, eight Americans were quietly flown home from the former ISIS caliphate in Syria. The two women and six minors, whose identities were not disclosed, are now being resettled at unnamed locations with help from the U.S. government. They are not the first citizens of the Islamic State to return. Four other Americans—three men […]