Argument
‘The Club’: Netflix’s Sephardic Heroine Braves Turkey’s Troubled Past
“The Club” also offers a biting social critique. For the show is less about the arrival of cocktail modernity to Istanbul than about the Turkification of cocktail modernity, i.e., a pincer movement by Kemalist state and society to substitute good secular Muslim Turks for Istanbul’s Greeks, Jews and Armenians.
Squid Game and the Plague of Capitalism
The smash Netflix series “Squid Game” shows the material hardship of those trampled by the free market system, but more than that, it shows what that system does for compassion: If your goal is to win, you must become heartless.
The Façade of the Afghan Jihad
To this small but influential number of Muslims in Europe and the U.S., Afghanistan is not really a country, but a mythical canvas onto which they can paint their own hopes and dreams.
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel: The Right Award for the Wrong Reason
In a contemporary world plagued by xenophobia and racism, Gurnah’s novels nudge us to get quiet and listen, to probe beyond the surfaces of our understanding. We might ask why and with what burdens people find themselves crossing the gulfs between continents and cultures, in what peculiarities of personal experience they might locate their senses of themselves, and in what unanticipated places they might find belonging.
The ‘Echo Chamber’ of Syrian Chemical Weapons Conspiracy Theorists
The real issue here is not so much the denial of chemical attacks as the way it serves as a vehicle for normalizing conspiracy theories under the guise of critical thinking. Admirable though it is to view news reports and government statements with caution and scrutinize the evidence, the denial campaign was something else, encouraging people to reject information at will simply because it didn't fit their view of how the world works.
Keir Starmer Won the War Within Labour. But Can He Win an Election?
“Post-conference polling, in the middle of a fuel crisis of the government’s own creation, still shows the party several points behind the Tories, and the electorate’s perception of the party’s electoral chances is poor.”
On the Screen, Libyans Learned About Everything but Themselves
From California to Cairo, none of the films that featured my country, Libya, could step out of an Orientalist vision of camels, belly dancers, an endless desert and, of course, our iconic “Brother Leader.”