Chechnya is like a small Afghanistan, occupied and brutalized by the Russians for almost 200 years. The Chechens, and their neighbors, fought back with all the means at their disposal against an invader that outnumbered and outgunned them. The Chechens resorted to ambush, hit-and-run and other guerilla tactics. The most recent spike . . .
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It seems unlikely that I will be doing today what I do probably at least 300 days of the year: walking from here in the North End across Boston proper, to the Museum of Fine Arts, or else Kenmore Square, and back again. As I write, looking out on the Italian American . . .
Read MoreThe Presence and Absence of Music in Mali Today In a recent NPR interview with Angelique Kidjo, journalist Michel Martin prompted a discussion of Kidjo’s political concerns and advocacy. Martin asked whether the girls served by the Malian branch of Kidjo’s Batonga Foundation—an organization dedicated to realizing universal access to secondary education for girls . . .
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Three weeks ago, Enver Hadžiomerspahić arrived at the Ars Aevi Bridge on Sarajevo’s Miljacka River, followed by a small army of reporters; he was there to mark his resignation as the director of Ars Aevi, the most impressive collection of contemporary art in the Balkans. Instead of giving a speech, Hadžiomerspahić took . . .
Read MoreThis fall’s college freshmen were seven years old when the US invaded Afghanistan. Most don’t remember the protests in the days before the invasion, which, as a college freshman in September 2001, I attended in Seattle. They don’t remember the predictions one heard at those marches—that the Bush administration would soon engineer . . .
Read MoreI admit it. I’m an addict. I just can’t stop watching, surfing, and listening to all this stuff. I know it’s vacuous, misdirected, and it’s certainly not good for me, but I do it anyway. Not only did I watch the entire so-called debate last night, I also watched the post-festum cud-chewers . . .
Read MoreI assume that you’ve been paying attention lately, and as a result, are suitably outraged, so I won’t have to tell you about Stéphane Hessel. You’ll already know his incredible story: how he moved from Berlin to Paris in 1924, when he was only seven. How, with his father, a German-Jewish writer, . . .
Read MoreI wasn’t in Sarajevo during the war; I also wasn’t here for its recent twentieth anniversary. A host of international journalists did return, and witnessed first-hand a very simple, devastating demonstration, staged by the theater director Haris Pasović, as testimony to the years of the Sarajevo siege. 11,541 empty red chairs, many . . .
Read MoreAskold Melnyczuk’s story, “Walk With Us,” in the Massachusetts Review Casualty issue, is so skillfully turned you don’t know who the subject is until the end. At the risk of being a spoiler and softening the moment of recognition, I have to say it’s about Lynndie England, the poster girl for Abu Ghraib. But . . .
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In a famous series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955, the philosopher James Langshaw Austin told us something everyone already knew: Language doesn’t just say things, it can also do things. In publication, the book based on these lectures took this point and ran with it. How to Do Things With . . .
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