Columbia Journalism Review
Barbara Hawkins—a grandmother from Arizona who is a registered independent—discovered the MeidasTouch Network eighteen months ago, when she was between books, scrolling idly on YouTube. Until then, her news diet had been the “old reliable mainstream media,” she told me, but she’d been getting fed up. “It’s rare to see mainstream media doing anything except treating this election cycle as business as usual,” she said. “There’s little discussion regarding the various threats we face as a nation.” Then she found MeidasTouch, which describes itself as doing “pro-democracy” journalism, and provides commentary on national politics seemingly calculated to appeal to those for whom Rachel Maddow is too subtle.
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Columbia Journalism Review
Getting hacked is very much like catching a nasty flu. It begins with an infection of malware—malicious software that spreads across a network—and ends with a feeling of deep enfeeblement. In late 2012, not long after the New York Times reported on a corruption scandal involving China’s former prime minister, the newsroom got a bad case. AT&T, which maintains the Times’ servers, notified the company that suspicious activity had been detected on its network. An internal investigation revealed an attack on a dramatic scale: Chinese hackers had broken into email accounts, stolen the passwords of every employee, installed forty-five pieces of customized malware, and begun spying on fifty-three employees, seeking information about anything related to the Chinese prime minister’s family. It was a complicated and devastating infection—a near masterpiece.
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The New York Times Magazine
It was late February when Suhaila Hashimi slid into one of the last available seats in the front row of her philosophy class, “The Place of Persons,” an intro-level course at Brown University about the moral and metaphysical status of personhood. Even though she was 23, and this was a class mostly for students who were several years younger, Hashimi fit in with them, her dark brown hair pulled into a messy ponytail, eyeliner darkening her lower lids, an oversize hoodie with Brown’s emblem on the front, black jeans tucked into black combat boots.
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Afar Magazine
First, you strip the beds. The linens and dirty towels need to be tossed down the laundry chute, to be washed immediately. Fresh linens from the cart are stretched across the mattress, folded at the creases. The bedspread must look freshly ironed; no wrinkles, Vida Afram was taught. Then, you vacuum every corner of the room. If the guest has too many personal items on the floor, you immediately call your manager to ask permission to move them. If there are valuables, your manager will probably come to supervise. You move on to the bathroom. You replace the lotion, conditioner, shampoo, and soap. Every room must look exactly like it did before the guest enters. The guest, in fact, must not be able to notice that anyone was ever there.
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The Atavist
Sometime after he had given up hope and then recovered it, Adolfo Davis began writing letters from his prison cell. Around 1999, he bought paper and pens from the commissary and wrote one letter after another, three times a week. He wrote on his bed, a squeaky metal frame with a lumpy loaf of a mattress, under the ugly glare of a fluorescent light bulb. There was nothing much to look at in his cell, just gray walls and a burnt-orange door made of steel, with tiny holes drilled through it. Muffled sounds from the hallway helped him figure out what time of day it was, when it was mealtime, which guards were working.
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Columbia Journalism Review
On January 26, Navreet Singh, a twenty-five-year-old farmer from Uttar Pradesh, in the north of India, hopped on a blue tractor and accelerated toward a police barricade erected in the middle of the street. It was supposed to be a celebratory day for India—the seventy-second anniversary of India’s democratic constitution—but instead, tens of thousands of farmers like Singh had shown up in the heart of New Delhi to protest Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest farm laws, which they saw as favoring private corporations over their interests. Moments later, Singh was dead.
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Virginia Quarterly Review
The offices of Caravan, a small but influential Indian monthly magazine, are housed on the third floor of a Soviet-style building in New Delhi. For a long time, Vinod Jose, the magazine’s executive editor, didn’t give much thought to the view outside his window: a budding thicket of gulmohar trees where, down below, smokers convened in small circles on their lunch break. But then, a few years ago, the view began to change. The netted steel cage of a new building began to rise out of the foliage, piquing Jose’s interest: It would be, he soon found out, the New Delhi headquarters for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India’s most powerful right-wing Hindu-nationalist organization, and a longtime fixation of Jose’s journalistic career.
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The Guardian
Ever since he was a teenager, Joshua Doggrell has believed that the former slave-holding states of the American south should secede from the United States. When he was a freshman in college at the University of Alabama in 1995, Doggrell discovered a group whose worldview chimed with his – the League of the South.
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Lapham's Quarterly
In the summer of 2016, a dizzying photograph from Chennai, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, circulated through international media outlets. The photo shows about a thousand Indian schoolchildren dressed in white and blue uniforms, their bodies arranged in rows of twos and fours and fives, their arms clasped in acute triangles above their heads. On the ground, there must have been pandemonium: young children, fatigued by the scorching June heat, confused by what they were doing or why they were being told to stand still. But from above, an aerial camera caught the shot, decoding the labyrinthine mess of blazing, colorful bodies as they spelled out a message: KEEP SMILING.
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Virginia Quarterly Review
At sunrise, professor Vishwambhar Nath Mishra wakes up, wraps a simple white Indian gamcha around his waist, and wades slowly into the Ganges River, dribbling the water over his arms and forehead. This bathing ritual is one his family has practiced for thirteen generations, performed by pious Hindus in Varanasi since the sixth century BCE. To dip into the Ganges is to be purified of all sins.
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The Point Magazine
There’s a scene early on in the French documentary Salafistes (“Jihadists”) where the camera spans over a throng of people gathered in a village in northern Mali: the crowd is there to watch as the “Islamic Police” cut off a 25-year-old man’s hand. The shot zooms in as the young man, tethered in ropes around a chair, slumps over, unconscious, while his hand is sawed off with a small, serrated blade.
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The Atlantic Monthly
Long before it became the first slavery memorial in the French West Indies, the Darboussier Sugar Factory powered France’s Caribbean empire. In the 19th century, the 77,000-square-foot factory, located in Pointe-à-Pitre, the largest city on the butterfly-shaped island of Guadeloupe, exported goods produced by slaves to mainland France. Today, strings of quartz, meant to represent the lost souls of the slave trade, crawl up the factory’s black-box-like exterior, embodying what has become the memorial’s unofficial motto: Memory Inspires the Future.
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Harper's Magazine
Like most things in Kashmir, the Baramulla railway station is surrounded by barbed wire, Indian Army bunkers, and frost-tipped mountains that, at sunset, look bloodstained and haunted. When I walked into the station in July 2016, I was stopped by a group of Indian soldiers armed with AK-47s who demanded to know what I was doing in Baramulla, a town just thirty miles from the Line of Control that has divided the disputed region between India and Pakistan since 1972.
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The Point Magazine
On June 4, 2013, a month before Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, was toppled by a coup d’état, a forum was held in Cairo under the title “Islam and Democracy.” The panel’s main attraction was Hamed Abdel-Samad, whose incendiary memoir, My Farewell from Heaven, had raised suspicion among religious authorities in the country. Dressed casually in a purple polo and speaking in simple, layman’s Arabic, the 41-year-old writer addressed the small crowd of mostly university students with a message that would soon endanger his life.
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Washington Monthly
Barack Obama had a vision—expressed in a literal, color-coded map he carried with him in 2009—for how high-speed rail would transform America. There would be 150,000 jobs, environmental benefits, less highway and airport congestion, and, most importantly, “a smart transportation system equal to the needs of the twenty-first century.”
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The Atlantic Monthly
Not long after his 19th birthday, David Vallat, a native Frenchman born to a secular family, converted to Islam. He was having an “existential crisis” and his new faith helped him curb his juvenile bêtises, or “bad behavior,” he told me. Few questioned his choice to convert either then or later when he joined the French army in 1992, to, as he saw it, protect the Bosnian Muslims in Yugoslavia. He would not “stand idly by” in the face of another genocide. Yet the war was a shock: After escaping death twice in three days, Vallat considered returning home—“as a coward,” he said.
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Roads & Kingdoms
The line outside New Zum Zum Hotel, a blue-tented, outdoor restaurant in a residential neighborhood in central Srinagar, had begun forming at 7 a.m., Gulam Rosul explains, quietly moving among the thirty boiling pots that lined the restaurant. Cars full of customers drive up as Mohamed Shafi, the owner, sits cross-legged, ladling food into takeaway bags.
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Roads & Kingdoms
Off Highway 33, the only paved highway connecting Cambodia’s sleepy beach towns of Kampot and Kep, sits a small, red road marked by a faded signpost that reads Welcome to Peper Farm. My tuk-tuk driver misses the road entirely the first time around, and we swing across the barren highway to retrace our steps. The air is stagnant in the 98-degree heat. It hardly seems like the road leading to one of Cambodia’s most prized products: Kampot pepper.
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Harper's Magazine
For centuries, writers have romanticized the Jammu and Kashmir region, an eighty-five-mile basin that today encompasses the disputed border between India and Pakistan. From the window of my plane, I could see why: the Pir Panjal Range met the Greater Himalayas like a wrinkled white curtain, exposing a fertile hotbed of saffron fields, forested hills, almond and walnut groves, apple trees, apricot orchards, and rice paddies. At the airport, I was greeted with signs that read “Paradise on Earth”—a strange slogan for a valley that has seen three full-blown wars and hundreds of thousands of deaths since the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.
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Slate
I thought a bottle of red wine would be an appropriate gift to bring to utopia. It was June in Pondicherry, a sleepy beach town off the Bay of Bengal characterized by its post-colonial French influence, and the mid-afternoon heat was oppressive, peaking just above 100 degrees. My clothes were damp by the time I found a liquor store, a grungy hole-in-the-wall shop on the corner of a typically South Indian pastel temple-crammed street.
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