Features
America’s Muslim Anxiety: Lessons from The Third Jihad
The past week has witnessed an escalating political crisis within the New York Police Department, sparked by the revelation that over a thousand officers viewed an Islamophobic film as part of a training exercise. The Third Jihad (view trailer here) was produced by the Clarion Fund, a New York-based non-profit that first gained...
Books Among Righteous Men
By Matthew Shaer
Last June, a federal judge in Washington ordered the Russian government to return to the Lubavitch-Chabad Hasidic movement a sizable library of religious texts and documents which had been seized by Bolshevik authorities in the 1920s. The library was later obtained by the Nazis, before finally ending up—in 1945—in the hands of...
Shifting Politics in the World’s Newest Nation
By Alex Thurston
South Sudan, though less than six months old as an independent nation, already faces challenges to its political and cultural unity: rebels abound, opposition groups denounce the ruling party, and ethnic tensions simmer. Christianity has provided a powerful platform for political mobilization in the region’s past, and churches continue to represent the strongest...
Making Alevism:
Lawfare, Secularism and The Secular
A response to Markus Dressler's essay, "Making Religion Through Secularist Legal Discourse: The Case of Turkish Alevism"
On a rather chill afternoon in March of 2005, I sat across from Ali Bey, the president of the Cem Foundation,...
On a rather chill afternoon in March of 2005, I sat across from Ali Bey, the president of the Cem Foundation,...Taking Tocqueville and Darwin for a Ride
By Nathan Schradle
If something like a “Global Civil Society” ever becomes a reality (I’m picturing a giant face made of thousands of tiny robots, like in the Matrix Revolutions… only hopefully slightly less hell-bent on the destruction of the human species), it may want to give a huge shout-out to the year 1831....
Painting a State of Suspension
by Narges Bajoghli
“The Chronicle of Her Innocence” by Bahar Behbahani at NYU Abu Dhabi
19 Washington Square North, New York, NY 10003
September 29, 2011 – January 27, 2012
“I, and only I, am responsible for what I recall and see, not individuals in the past who could not have known what effect they might have on...
The House of David
An excerpt from Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford University Press, 2011) by Rebecca Alpert, from Chapter Four, The Conflict over Baseball Comedy.
A few independent white baseball teams also clowned and relied on novelty to gain bookings. The best known of these teams was the House of David. The team originated in...
How to Make a Zombie
by Nora Connor
In its October issue, Harper’s* revisits the zombie phenomenon--the Haitian kind, that is, not the George Romero kind. Which, come to think of it, makes it a bit of a strange Halloween selection. Journalist Hamilton Morris did his reporting pre-earthquake; the social feature most representative of Haiti’s practical difficulties is an...
From Birchers to Birthers?
An excerpt from Heather Hendershot's new book, What's Fair on the Air: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (Chicago, 2011).
Hendershot, a professor at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center, will be reading from What's Fair TONIGHT, Friday, September 23 at 5 pm at the NYU Bookstore. Our founding editor, Jeff Sharlet, will be...
Pictures at an Exhibition
By Abby Ohlheiser
Photos by Merel van Beeren
"Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and the Hartmanns perish??" --Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky
I was sitting in a French-style chain cafe (sorry America), finishing my croissant, talking to Merel, when we heard the opening notes of "The Star Spangled Banner." It was a restrained, beautiful choral...
Remembering Differently:
Coping with 9/11 Fatigue
by Jeremy F. Walton
9/11 fatigue is a fully comprehensible, affective response to the cadences of nationalism that have accompanied public commemoration of the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. But this fatigue should not constitute the alibi for indifference, solipsism, or cynicism.
Several weeks after September 11, 2001, I participated in what was surely a...
