Monocle #49: SOFT POWER IN ITS OWN 555 WORDS

The world’s only superpower is public opinion.

Bidoun

Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Uneasy listening

In December of 1985, James Vance and Raymond Belknap, age twenty and eighteen, respectively, shot themselves in the face after many hours of beer drinking and dope smoking in a church parking lot in the town of Sparks, Nevada.

Negar Azimi

Franziska Pierwoss: Car talk

The funny thing about Franziska Pierwoss is that despite spending much of the past six months immersed in the intricacies of Beiruti car culture — from body kits and butterfly doors to the ups and downs of drifting — she doesn’t actually know how to drive.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

The Angry, Angry Arab

As’ad AbuKhalil is a serious-minded political scientist and an erudite commentator on Middle Eastern politics.

Babak Radboy, E.P. Licursi

The Marble Lawn

I was seven when my father left for Saudi Arabia.

Yasmine El Rashidi

Occupy Godhead

As the motorcade crept up Broadway, the shower of tickertape and confetti was so thick that one might have failed to notice Emperor Haile Selassie I, serene as a saint, buried in the pomp and protocol of his own welcoming.

Anna Della Subin

Soft Readers Prefer Hard Covers

Last year, for the first time, e-books outsold hardback editions on Amazon.com. We are past the Rubicon. It’s a new frontier for digitized distribution, a post-publishing paroxysm.

Shumon Basar

The Chibsi Challenge

Crisps or chips?

Sophia Al-Maria, Sukhdev Sandhu, Anna Della Subin, Michael C. Vazquez, E.P. Licursi, Yasmeen Alsudairy, Sarah Fan, Andy Pressman

In the Presence of Absence: Present without leave

Mahmoud Darwish’s later poetry is a gathering of ghosts.

Robyn Creswell

Utopia

My first introduction to Egypt’s Beverly Hills came sometime in 2006. Its billboard loomed over a dust-coated building, visible from a crossroads of thoroughfares and the looping tentacles of the mammoth bridge that links downtown to every other part of the city.

Yasmine El Rashidi

Hamlet’s Arab Journey

Nasser was not Hamlet, and he was no Macbeth.

Hussein Omar

The Bequest of Quest

Quest was strange, delightful, controversial, and mostly forgotten.

Michael C. Vazquez

Iman Issa: Radical subtraction

A long glass display case holds a meticulous arrangement of an older man’s effects, including cufflinks, a pocket watch, a letter opener, and two albums of black-and-white photographs.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Call Me Soft

On a warm August night in Brussels, a curator, Orient, of feminist inclination, dressed up in an Egyptian belly dance costume, swaying her hips and breasts to Umm Kulthum’s epic song of a thousand and one nights.

Sarah Rifky

The Serendipity of Sand

If my former boss were reduced to a collection of ideal geometric forms, he would be a circle and a line segment. If described by a child, in deepest winter: two-thirds of a snowman on a stick.

Anand Balakrishnan

A Rose in the Desert

Bidoun

Letter to the Editors

From: “SUZANNE MUBARAK”

Bidoun

Talk of the Townhouse: William Wells

A conversation with William Wells, director of The Townhouse Gallery in downtown Cairo, where Bidoun was in residency for two months.

Bidoun

The Revolution Will Not Be Fictionalized

The writer Mahmoud Othman talks about his sci-fi novel Revolution 2053, which, in more ways than one, prophesied the events of the revolution of 2011.

Mahmoud Othman

Enough is Not Enough: Abdel-Halim Qandil

Abdel-Halim Qandil is a prolific journalist and editor whose work has been censored or banned many times in the past decade.

Bidoun