The Electric Typewriter
Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers.by Tony Judt
At 58, Israel has no friends aside from the U.S. and its claims of victimhood and anti-Semitism are falling on increasingly deaf ears. The time has come to mature.
by Mitchell Prothero
The battle takes place underground in a grungy, bunker-like basement underneath a Beirut strip mall. When the grenades go off it’s like being caught out in a ferocious thunderstorm: blinding flashes of hot white light, blasts of sound that reverberate deep inside my ears…
by Tony Judt
The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed. On the corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and a handful of terrorists can all claim victory, and they do. Have we reached the end of the road? What is to be done?
By James Bamford
In a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man’s chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man’s brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.
by Tim Cahill
This was ground zero for the largest man-made environmental disaster in history. It was a perfect vision of hell.
by George Saunders
A guided tour through steroidal capitalism, world revolution, and the finest hotel rooms money can buy.
By Bernard Lewis
(From 1990)
Nowhere in the Muslim world, in the Middle East or elsewhere, has American policy suffered disasters or encountered problems comparable to those in Southeast Asia or Central America. There is no Cuba, no Vietnam, in the Muslim world, and no place where American forces are involved as combatants or even as “advisers.” But there is a Libya, an Iran, and a Lebanon, and a surge of hatred that distresses, alarms, and above all baffles Americans.
By Johann Hari
Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging.
