Review
A Country Misread
Syria’s revolution was first crushed, and then misread. Five recent books on the long uprising and its surprising aftermath show how elites, ideologues and foreign observers alike failed to see the people at its heart.
Hind Rajab and the Dying Light
If Hind’s voice is a reproach, then the humanity of her would-be rescuers is redemption, however inadequate. For the hours they spent with her — comforting and reassuring the child on one hand, berating and beseeching her tormentors on the other — they expiate our collective guilt.
Sri Lanka’s Civil War and the Limits of Literature
As new mass graves are exhumed in Sri Lanka, a journalist who spent years embedded with the Tamil Tigers surveys the works dealing with the country’s civil war and asks whether, between myth and memory, fiction and nonfiction, a narrative can ever be complete.
A Remarkable Retelling of an Improbable Revolt
Ken Burns’ documentary “The American Revolution” has helped move citizens of Mexican descent and other people of color from the margins to the center of the country’s founding story.
America’s Unraveling on Screen
Filmmakers are increasingly registering, and, in turn, reflecting back at us from the silver screen, fears of a future defined by vigilantism, insurgencies and state violence. Films like “Civil War,” “The Order,” “Eddington” and “One Battle After Another” warn of what might follow the collapse of conventional politics.
How a Classic Russian Opera Became a Work of Protest
The opera “Boris Godunov” — first performed in St. Petersburg in 1874 — has, in recent years, become a lightning rod for clashing interpretations of Putin’s regime and, by extension, the question of Russians’ complicity in the bloodshed in Ukraine.
Writers Explore the Long Shadow of Partition in South Asia
The Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 was never just a historical event — it continues to shape lives, identities and communities across South Asia and its diaspora. Contemporary writers are reframing it as a complex, ongoing phenomenon, revealing enduring displacement and intergenerational trauma.