Essays
The Heart of Stone Age Britain
Thousands of years ago, Orkney was at the heart of Neolithic northern Europe — its landmark buildings welcoming vast numbers of people. Now the main archaeological site on the island has been reburied after 20 years of astonishing research, just as it’s revealed that the Altar Stone of Stonehenge came from nearby.
Forging a State
As Syria prepares to transition into a post-Assad era, questions about what principles the country will enshrine in its new constitution are already emerging. Many have been asked before, as a look back at a century of attempts to birth a modern Syrian state reveals.
Caste Is Having a Cultural and Political Moment Globally. It Has Not Always Been So
While caste has recently infiltrated American discourse and become more mainstream in Indian media, Dalit writers and activists have been flooding the Indian literary markets with memoirs, short fiction and poetry since the late 1960s.
How East Timor Blazed the Way for Hacktivism
Activists, hackers and dissident exiles helped put one of the least-connected places on Earth, East Timor, at the cutting-edge of online advocacy – all while making Ireland the target of one of the world’s first state-sponsored cyberattacks.
Walking the Camino to Santiago de Compostela
I wanted to understand what pilgrims’ journeys meant to them, and why shrines and their relics, which should be anathema in modern times, continue to draw huge numbers of people. So my partner Sue and I joined the throngs seeking answers on the Camino to Santiago de Compostela.
The Painful Transformation of a Historic Istanbul Neighborhood
The redevelopment of the Tokludede neighborhood in Istanbul reveals how such places and their communities have been torn open by Turkey’s embrace of modernization and global capitalism, with many of its former residents cast out to be replaced with a new culture and lifestyle.
What the Stabbing of a Nobel Prize-Winning Novelist Tells Us About Power in Egypt
The attempted assassination of the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz is remembered as a story of Islamist extremism. Yet the original controversy sparked by his work, particularly “Children of the Alley,” was more to do with his powerful political vision than his views on religion.