Girls at War
The Young Activists of Israel: How a group of teenage believers could reshape the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
Tablet Mag
“Ulpana High school, Where settler girls go to become ‘real men’ ” That was the headline I read. You think of settler girls and you think “Little House on the Prairie” or the Jewish equivalent of the Girls Madrassas I’ve been to in Pakistan: Learn your religion, learn how to be a good wife, then have 10 children. But the girls in this story were getting all that and a little extra.
Sabiha Gökcen’s Wings
Certain things in the Turkish national pantheon, you touch upon peril of death. The man called Ataturk. The notion of Turkish identity. YouTube died in Turkey recently after the government decided that Armenians and other anti-Turkish elements were smearing the nation with videos insinuating that Ataturk was gay. But YouTube will be back; Hrant Dink, the idealistic editor, journalist, and minority rights activist, will not.
If Not Peace, Then Justice
The New York Times Magazine
A thick afternoon fog enveloped the trees and streetlights of The Hague, a placid city built along canals, a city of art galleries, clothing boutiques, Vermeers and Eschers. It is not for these old European boulevards, however, that The Hague figures in the minds of men and women in places as far apart as Uganda, Sarajevo and now Sudan. Rather, it symbolizes the possibility of some justice in the world, when the state has collapsed or turned into an instrument of terror…
Mr. Lebanon
Anatomy of an Icon
Bidoun
We’d just finished Saturday lunch, and Nawaf Salam, an author and professor of political science at the American University in Beirut, wanted to try out a theory about the assassination of Rafiq Hariri he’d been marinating for a few weeks…
Fern Holland's War
The New York Times Magazine
Late one night this past March in the Babylon Hotel, on the banks of the Euphrates River, Fern Holland sat alone in her office writing e-mail -- unwinding, she wrote to a friend, with a glass of Johnnie Walker and listening to Michelle Branch singing "All You Wanted." She had many things on her mind, and among them was figuring out where she could get a bulldozer so she could help two Iraqi women get their land back…
The Jihadi Who Kept Asking Why
The New York Times Magazine
Shortly before midnight on May 12, 2003, Riyadh, the Saudi capital, was jolted awake by a series of synchronized car bombs that ripped through three residential compounds across the city. Twenty-five people from several nations, including Saudis, were killed…
The Battle Within
The New York Times Magazine
Suppose you're an architect, ambitious and eager to build. You're teaching theories of design at a university. You push your students to think and ask questions. You see yourself as an activist, aware of and inspired by ideas of civic responsibility. One day the department chairman tells you that he has received a report…
The Cult of Rajavi
For more than 30 years, the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People's Mujahedeen, has survived and operated on the margins of history and the slivers of land that Saddam Hussein and French governments have proffered it.
The Millimeter Revolution
The New York Times Magazine
In the winter of 1979, one day after the Iranian revolution extinguished the reign of the shahs, the gates to the notorious Evin prison in northern Tehran were thrown open, and Emadeddin Baghi went in to have a look…
The Most Wanted Palestinian
The New York Times Magazine
In the early morning of April 5, in the West Bank town of Tubas, an elderly man was milking his goats in his olive grove when he heard the whining of an unmanned drone in the sky. He looked up and saw Israeli special forces emerging from behind some trees on the nearby hillside and from cars with Palestinian plates…