Articles

Slow Speed: Elegies of underdevelopment

Outside my house, a consumer revolution is turning my country upside down. The revolution is televised. In fact, to a large extent, it is television.

Kai Friese

The Way of the Ostrich: Or, How Not to Resist Modernity

We acquired our reputation in the desert. The most deserted desert in the world, a vast sea rippled with ridges and waves and islands of sand.

Sophia Al-Maria

Dear Catastrophe Architect: Albert Speer and the Garden of Spandau

Speer’s buildings embodied the jumbled, confused, self-contradictory, and even self-hating relationship with modernity that National Socialism espoused

Benjamin Tiven

Conspiracy!: Foreign funding of the arts in Egypt

Egypt’s Ministry of Culture moves from guardian of culture to decrepit bureaucratic monolith spewing prêt-a-porter molds of sanitized discourse and production.

Mohammed Yousri

Mohammed al-Riffai: Taking amateur science seriously

Mohammed al-Riffai’s surprisingly unironic artistic practice asks us to take amateur science seriously.

Clare Davies

Yoshua Okon: Bringing together talk ­show aficionados, barbarians, and Third Reich devotees

What could possibly bring together a lineup of talk ­show aficionados, a barbarian/urban setting, and a group of Third Reich devotees?

Magali Arriola

Perfect Sound Forever: The extraordinary data of Erkki Kurenniemi

Kurenniemi’s imaginary future postulates the possibility of science “curing death away” and finding the formula for eternal life by the year 2050.

Mika Taanila

Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads: Making worlds with Wikipedia

If Israel or the Palestinian Authority isn’t sending young talent into Wikipedia, then they ought to be, and almost certainly soon will be.

Curtis Brown

Free Love, Funny Costumes and a Canal at Suez: The Saint-Simonians in Egypt

We will thus place one foot on the Nile, the other on Jerusalem; our right hand will extend toward Mecca, our left arm will cover Rome and rest against Paris.

Marwa Elshakry

Let Them Eat Laptops: On the One Laptop per Child project

I’ll make a bold proposal and say that in any slum where there is a reasonable amount of literacy, you’ll find local entrepreneurs assem­bling computers at the cheapest price possible.

Alaa Abd El Fattah, Bidoun, Park Doing, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, SJ Klein

Body Tech: Friday Night Lights and family television

Always start with protein; front-load your carbs; avoid fast-digesting foods; strike a balance; monitor more than your abs.

Bruce Hainley

Gentleman’s Agreement: Notes on Casino Royale

From Ulysses to Hamlet to Inspector Gadget — not to mention the crucifixion itself: the simple story of a seditious Nazarene getting the Guantanamo treatment has been repeated trillion-fold over the last two thousand years.

Tirdad Zolghadr

Chicago

Patriotism is narcissistic; so are soap operas.

Youssef Rakha

Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran

Most of us ordinary Americans, with our limited time, energy, and resources, take shortcuts to our political positions; it’s inevitable.

George Scialabba

Yael Bartana’s Summer Camp

Yael Bartana has described herself as an amateur anthropologist.

Emily Speers Mears

The Senegal of the Mind: An appreciation

The Senegalese of the Mind are very fond of Beirut (the Paris of the Middle East), as well as Buenos Aires (the Paris of South America), and Paris (the Paris of France).

Binyavanga Wainaina

Kingdom of the Dolls: In Desert Hot Springs, the history of civilization in miniature

The wheels on Napoleon’s coach were made from ice cream container lids, and its hubcaps were champagne corks.

Sean Dockray

Jill Magid: Love letters to the Liverpool police

She loved the feeling not only of being followed, not only of seducing systems of power, but of monopolizing the surveillance grid until it ditched its purpose — whatever that was — for an addiction, an obsession, the lady in the red coat.

Elizabeth Rubin

Bidune: Foreign policy through the lens of Dune

Had those boys read Dune, they might have thought twice about occupying Iraq. Not least because of the sandworms.

Anand Balakrishnan

Glory: The soft bigotry of great expectations

We had food fights with the porridge every evening, and the floor would be littered with the clumpy remnants of America’s love.

Binyavanga Wainaina