Articles

The Work of Sport in the Age of International Acquisition: How Arabized Kenyan runners have brought glory to the Emirates and undermined the patriotic conceit of the international-sports economy

Hardly anyone took notice when Cherono switched his citizenship and name in exchange for a lifetime monthly salary of $1,000 and the standard complement of elite trainers and cutting-edge facilities.

Alexander Provan

Beyond the Rally of the Dolls: A conversation with Nada Zeidan

Drive along the corniche in Doha tonight and you’ll see the laser lights and heart-shaped fireworks of victory.

Sophia Al-Maria

Hello Gorgeous: The glory and the loneliness of Omar Sharif, Egypt’s top bridge player

Omar Sharif represented Egypt in the 1964 Olympics for the game of contract bridge, according to one of the more benign rumors circulating about him on the internet.

Curtis Brown

Thwack!: Bollywood, cricket, and the dignity of sport

From 1892 to 1946, India’s premier cricket tournament was fought on the pitch by a pantheon of adversaries: the British, the Hindoos, the Parsees of the Zoroastrian Cricket Club, the Muslims of the Mohammedan Gymkhana, and, as of 1937, a team called “The Rest,” made up of Buddhists, Jews, and Indian Christians.

Anna Della Subin

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

It’s hard to know who was the first to say: “Art is anything you can get away with,” but chances are good it was Marshall McLuhan, not Andy Warhol.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Global Hotting: The war over the hottest chili in the world

The news was delicious, and not just as a pick-me-up for a nation still hungry for global recognition.

Kai Friese

Inglorious Bustards: The art and culture of hunting with birds

What, exactly, is a sport? An organized competition? War by any other name?

Meera Subramanian

Letter to the Editors

Dear guys, You asked me about football?

Sohrab Mohebbi

Alvaro Perdices: ‘Zabana Inshallah’: proposal for an inherited culture

In 2009, Los Angeles-based artist Álvaro Perdices traveled to Oran, Algeria, with a friend working on the restoration and preservation of cultural artifacts at the Musée National Zabana.

Aram Moshayedi

My Siamese Leg: Racing on stilts

Exercise was our father demanding that we fetch a Sidney Bechet album from a pile of records, or yet another book from his bedroom at the other end of our vast, lugubrious house, which had once been the German embassy.

Gini Alhadeff

You Are the Expert: Actual transcript of Navad (90), Iran’s most popular TV show

Special Report Dateline: Saadat Shahr Last week we showed you some controversial images from Saadat Shahr Stadium in Fars province, near Shiraz.

Sohrab Mohebbi

The Hashimite Kingdom: A Conversation with Jerry Calliste Jr. aka Hashim

In 1984, Madonna Louise Ciccone left a downtown Manhattan club without her leather wristbands.

Dave Tomkins

Artists’ Magazines

By the end of the 1960s, Artforum had become the country’s dominant art magazine — part Sears Roebuck catalog for the McLuhan generation, part promotional vehicle for a clutch of New York abstract painters and the formalist critics who favored them.

Alexander Provan

Malaysiana

Personally, he said, he found the whole business of awarding pins, medals, and plaques a frivolity.

Farihah Zaman

Ming Wong: “Becoming” with Ming Wong and His Wigs

A Chinese expatriate raised in Singapore, educated in the United Kingdom, and now a resident of Berlin, Wong has tugged at his own itinerancy in crafting a distinct body of work over the last decade.

Shanay Jhaveri

Hrair Sarkissian: Dream Color

Hrair Sarkissian’s best-known work to date is a series of large color photographs depicting empty streets in early morning light.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

The Artist-Bureaucrat Speaks: What happened to Cairo’s Van Gogh ‘Poppy Flowers’?

“The painting is a piece of shit,” said Mohsen Shaalan, head of Egypt’s Fine Art Sector.

Clare Davies

The iWonk: Steve Jobs: Chairman and CEO of Apple, Inc

In August 2008, Bloomberg News accidentally published a seventeen-page obituary for Steve Jobs.

Anna Della Subin

Prodigy: Alia Sabur: The World’s Youngest Professor / Julie Sabur: Mother of the World’s Youngest Professor

Alia Sabur holds the Guinness World Record for youngest professor, having attained the position of lecturer in the Department of Advanced Technology Fusion at Seoul’s Konkuk University at the age of eighteen.

Alexander Provan

The Paradise Flycatcher: Zafar Futehally: Birdwatcher

In February 1961, the Newsletter for Birdwatchers was two years old and its founder-editor, Zafar Futehally, was on a roll.

Achal Prabhala