Articles

The Video People

1990s VHS Tehran Cinephiliacs

Soft Dramaturgy: A Conversation with Lukas Duwenhögger, Part II

Precluding the indifferent, eradicating void and uninspiring vastness of, for instance, sunsets.

Soft Dramaturgy: A Conversation with Lukas Duwenhögger, Part I

I hope these words make you cry.

Mary Boone is Egyptian

“I find the whole notion of celebrity embarrassing.”

Ghariba

Love and romance, dating and friendship, loneliness and community, all set against the terror of aging.

William Wells

Down at the end of Nabrawy and Hussein El Me’mar Pasha streets, just minutes from Tahrir Square, lies one of those improbable Cairo junctions that seem to suggest an entire world.

Laila Soueif

For decades, Laila Soueif has been a familiar sight at protests across Cairo.

Youssef Rakha

The writer Youssef Rakha is the only child of a former Marxist lawyer and a translator.

The Pasha Resurrects: What ‘Isa Ibn Hisham Told Us

Sometime in the late 1890s, a struggling writer named ‘Isa took a walk in the City of the Dead.

In all cases, it was a beautiful film to make

Amr Ezzat has always had vivid dreams.

Salima Ikram

I mean, if all else fails, I’ll always have butchery. Or I guess I could work in a funeral home.

The Delicacy of Radicalism

Squander.

Letter from the Creative Director

The issue of Bidoun you hold in your hands has a photograph affixed to its cover.

It Was a Publisher’s Idea

On the Bidoun Library.

Michael Stevenson: The deck is always stacked

It is a rare Marxist who does not believe in God but swears that the existence of the devil can be proven by the swing of a door.

Michelle Kuo

“If I can read a description of a work and that’s all that you need to know about the work, it’s probably not a very interesting work.”

Yasmine Hamdan

It’s very weird, because you can change the meaning just by taking a bath beforehand, or having a fight with your mother. I’m a moody singer.

Navid Negahban

“I have friends in high school who went to the front line, they come back to school… or they don’t come back, and there’s a red tulip sitting in the chair next to you, and you know that the person is not coming back.”

Conner Habib

“We pretend that sex is some sort of unified animal instinct and that everyone shares it. That’s true at some level, obviously, but our desires are our own. And they are little pathways into our consciousness.”

Marina Warner

“My favorite present to give people used to be a seahorse. They cost twenty pence or something — in those days it was probably a florin — in a little shop that sold straw and raffia and natural products of that kind. For a long time I wanted to write about seahorses, because the male carries the baby.”